Organizing a dialogue between the two authors of this book has replicated and focused the problems of otherness that we have been discussing throughout. Although we are both academics, and we have been colleagues, the academic traditions we represent and draw upon feature a common pattern of similarity and difference. At the most basic level, both sociology and theology are clearly centrally interested in relations with and between other people, and in the relations with what might be called the non-human, including the divine and the social. Both are committed to understanding the subjective reactions of other people, and also in making their theoretical work related in some way to those reactions, most obviously as a kind of therapy or politics.

That the two disciplines have shared an intellectual heritage that persists has been argued in a number of ways. William Keenan (2003) represents one of the more recent commentaries, drawing on earlier work, especially that of David Martin, a sociologist and an Anglican priest. There are residual and unreflected theological influences on sociology that have influenced a number of theoretical debates. Unfortunately, they include a narrow puritanism, Keenan argues, which has informed a defensiveness, an interest in strong subject boundaries. Technicism has added to this conceptual isolation. Sociology must reawaken its interest in the sacramental, Keenan suggests, not only to acquire new ideas and new resources with which to criticize advanced modernity and its meaninglessness, but also to put it in touch with everyday thinking, which remains religious, in a good sense that cannot be reduced to ideology or neurosis.