[The Gospel: “I call you no longer servants but friends...”]

I approached The Enchantment of Sociology primarily as a sociologist of religion who teaches within both the Theology and Social and Political Science Faculties of an ancient University and whose research interests include the impact of the social sciences upon religious functionaries. I am also an intermittently active Anglican. From all three perspectives I was wholly engaged—if not always wholly enchanted—by Flanagan’s quirky originality, capacity for creative polemic, and heady mixture of sociological radicalism and theological conservatism. The prose is often dense, convoluted and subtly nuanced but a close and careful reading brings with it those two rarities, sustained intellectual excitement and an urge to continue the argument beyond the academy and into pulpit and presbytery.

At one point Flanagan cites Cooley’s observation that “a true sociology is systematic autobiography” (p.50) and in this case three components of personal biography form an integral subtext to his main arguments. One is his Irish identity. This, when not being acted out in Joycean word-play (eg. “exasperating an individualism” (p.9]),Wildean aphorism (“Satanism... a folk panic invented by Evangelical fundamentalists” [p.45]) or Shavian table talk (“theologians can appeal to the Holy Ghost when all the sociologist can evoke is the ghost of Weber” [p.86]), is nucleated around both a sense of being at one remove from English society and culture, and pride in what he calls “the capricious genius of the Gaelic intellect lying beyond the pale” (p.153).

Recently, the anthropologist Mary Douglas has pleaded for a space within the Church's pastoral life, in which women’s contributions could be fully valued. Her article might appear to some as a make-do solution, because it advocates using the area which has not been claimed by the hierarchy so as to spell out a proper task for women. The misgivings of some feminists might actually be heightened even further by her last paragraph, on the caring role of women. For has this not been the age-old role pattern? Maybe it has. But as the article was printed in a special issue on the sacramental life of the Church, there is a strong case for its argument, looking at a much neglected side of the Eucharistic tradition. I wish to highlight this by reflecting on an insight of the Nigerian sister and exegete Teresa Okure, and especially on a most revealing, new definition of the Church which emerged from the African Synod (three years ago, April-May 1994), calling the Church ‘the Family of God'.

In keeping with the hope that African perspectives may also inspire the Church at large—as the papal exhortation Ecclesia in Africa expresses it—I venture to join the research on this concept. Although the papal text openly endorses this term at the outset of the third phase of the synodal process, it does not wish to advance any specific interpretation of it yet. It sees it clearly as a notion that is still to mature in the interchange between pastoral practice and reflection.

In May 1996, addressing the central problems of faith, Ratzinger commented on the great disillusionment and non-fulfillment of hope that came after 1989. Covering issues such as pluralism and New Age religions, where god replaced God, Ratzinger observed that “if we consider the present cultural situation....frankly it must seem a miracle that there is still Christian faith despite everything”. For him, relativism has now become the central problem of the faith. But the issues he raises also belong to sociology. It also has to deal with relativism, nihilism and the escape into the New Age, the unexpected spiritual impulses that mark the condition known as postmodemity. Uncertainty has arisen over religious affiliations that oscillate between pluralism and fundamentalism, both ambiguous responses to modernity. The relationships between theology and culture have been affected in an inescapable manner.

The Enchantment of Sociology is an effort to provide something oddly unwritten: a sociological reading of the link between theology and culture. It was conceived against the moral and cultural despond of British society between August 1991 and Easter 1995. The theological mandate for the book, as Howes notices, came from Radcliffe’s irenic hope for peace in the vexatious relations between theology and sociology. His belief was that sociology could “provide a locus for the encounter of gospel and the world” and that this would be accomplished through the internal transformation of the discipline itself. The need for sociology to re-think its place in its own field of deliberations relates to a wider sense of unsettlement in a society characterised by postmodemity where matters concerning spirituality, identity and community have become uncertain.