Kieran Flanagan

Liturgy, Ambiguity and Silence: The Ritual Management of Real Absence

This paper is a preliminary exploration of a neglected area in sociology of religion. It aims to interpret and to characterize the distinctive performative basis of Christian liturgy. Ambiguities in liturgical enactment can be routinely handled as long as they relate to the nuministic content of the rite and not to its social form. Silence is a distinctive non-reducible phenomenon of rite that can be related to the regulation of ceremonial form through tactful management of the implicit. Liturgies work on the basis of an apophatic characteristic that makes them distinctive as religious rituals.

Reflexivity, Ethics and the Teaching of the Sociology of Religion

This essay reflects on the ethical and reflexive considerations surrounding the use of student fieldwork reports on a course on the sociology of religion. Using reflexivity as a teaching strategy coincides with changes in sociological approaches to religion where experiential and substantive issues are stressed in its study. Reflexive and ethical issues that emerge on courses on sexuality and gender politics are compared to those which seem peculiar to the teaching of religion from a sociological perspective. Study of these fieldwork reports disclosed the way students faced their own ethical worries in a task generated to enhance their own reflexivity but also an understanding of religiosity.

Commissions of inquiry as ritual: Bourdieu, the marquis and the Endowed Schools of Ireland, 1854-58

Recent concerns in Ireland with memorialisation and cultural nationalism facilitate a sociological appraisal of the unjustly neglected Kildare Commission on Endowed Schools, 1854–58. Uniquely, it was an exercise in modernisation and rationalisation of cultural capital set to supply hope to Irish Protestants in the post-Famine era. The sociological significance of the Commission lies in the understandings it offers of the link between print culture, Blue Books (parliamentary inquiries) and politics; Bourdieus notion of informational capital; and Webers interest in social inquiries as checks on bureaucratic power. The fieldwork of the inquiry had ritual and quasi-ethnographic properties which systematically brought to light the hidden social conditions of these schools.

Holy and Unholy Rites: Lies and Mistakes in Liturgy

Since the Second Vatican Council, there has been a tendency amongst theologians and liturgists to give modern culture a benign, undifferentiated ‘reading’, one innocent of the sociological complications such a view poses. A stress on incarnational theology gave a blanket blessing to culture, that was not offset by an awareness of the degree to which it has ambiguous, limited qualities that beg questions of meaning. Theologians seem to have become enchanted with modern culture, precisely at the time when sociologists became disenchanted and began to review its theoretical significance in the light of a growing awareness of post-modernism. A theological failure to specify the use of culture within a particular context partly accounts for the naivete of many of its contemporary positions and the degree to which it has taken refuge in ideology rather than sociology to shape its presuppositions about religion and society.

Martyrs and martyrdom

It might seem that martyrs and martyrdom have vanished into history in contemporary Europe. For many, the amnesia surrounding the topic is justifiable, for the practice of self-sacrifice of a life for a cause seems distasteful in a modern era. There is something inexplicable, almost mysterious about the martyr’s death. For some, death is a voluntary abdication from life as in the case of euthanasia or suicide. Millions died in twentieth-century wars. Yet, against this background of ambivalent attitudes to death, the martyr’s demise is singular. It is sacrificial and often deliberate. The death is seldom accidental. Why should somebody healthy in mind and body arrange their affairs to die for something ultimate, of politics, culture and religion? The deliberate donation of a life seems for many a wager too far. In an age of indifference if not, cynicism towards ideals the notion that anybody would lay down their lives for these seems bizarre. A wealth of issues surrounds this neglected topic of martyrs and martyrdom which the seven contributors explore in this special issue of Mortality. Did the martyrs die in vain for a false God or gods or discredited or nascent political ideologies? Did they deserve the title martyr and if so who had the rights of conferral? Could the cause for which they died be separated from the manner of their death? Might the martyr be noble in sacrifice, but misguided in permitting a cause to make such a final claim on the living? Is the term martyr to be confined to the proclamation of a religious truth, or is it to be widened in application to cover political and cultural causes? Is the martyrs’ testimony a writ binding those to come, or is the legacy to be recast according to exigency? Of the death of the martyr, is it really a form of suicide rather than one of sacrifice? Set in the context of A Secular Age (Taylor, 2007) where unbelief is normative and belief is exceptional, martyrdom emerges today as unexpected, unwanted and decidedly enigmatic. By their acts of self-sacrifice for a higher duty, martyrs come as saboteurs to subvert the tenets of secularity that religion is inconsequential. In submitting to death voluntarily, martyrs speak otherwise. For them, religious belief or political commitment is deeply consequential and

Postmodernity and Culture: Sociological Wagers of the Self in Theology

The Nine O’Clock Service at Ponds Forge Sports Complex in the centre of Sheffield attracted a large congregation. With the public support of the Anglican Bishop of Sheffield, the service took the form of a Planetary Mass. The atmosphere was described as ‘a sea of paradox’. In the Mass, beat, dance, light and meditation were used to ‘reconnect people with God’. The rite seemed filled with the unexpected. The offertory procession included the expected bread and wine, but also earth and a Big Mac, when prayers were said pointedly ‘for integrity’. Sacraments were regarded as the ‘epicentre of a new Big Bang’ and were illustrated with dance, clockwise and anti-clockwise. The rite catered for those wrecked by the hard end of culture. A New Age Church, in sympathy with the creation theology of an ex-Dominican, Matthew Fox, sought a site of relevance in the field of cultural change. A searching for repentance and change in attitudes to creation was incorporated in a seeking for Songs of Post-modernism. Theories of postfeminism and deconstruction were also embodied in this form of rite that might seem to express all that a sociologist could hope for, signifying all his analytical dreams, with a priestly blessing of empowerment and sacralisation.1

Book review: The Liquidation of the Church

(p. 89). There are certainly some great critical points raised, here – especially on the disruption to Jameson’s periodization provided by Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, or in challenges to the uneven way he chooses to read Van Gogh’s and Warhol’s shoes. But there’s also more than a whiff of injustice here, given, say, Jameson’s attempt – not made by other Marxian critics of the post-modern – to avoid moralizing about cultural periods, or, in a different direction, given the absence of any sharp commentary on what could easily be interpreted as the vague, lame, liberal handwringing of Lyotard’s late comments on post-modern politics and ethics. Much more positively, the perhaps less than expected entries are often quite delightful. ‘Paraliterature’ is an enticing contribution, containing some fun poking at grumpy old Harold Bloom, as well as an amusing rubbing together of Ulysses and Game of Thrones: ‘I have never been able to acquire a facsimile of Leopold Bloom’s sham Crown Derby “moustachecup” from Ulysses, but I can wear a House Targaryen bronze talisman necklace or stalk the suburbs wearing the scabbard of Jon Snow’ (p. 126). ‘Punk’ is illuminating, Wark again well equipped for some post-Situationist meditations on the question of recuperation. And ‘Remix’, similarly, is attuned to some of the more baffling (for the long in tooth) happenings of online culture – say, the endless meme rescriptings of The Downfall. Despite, then, some possible initial disappointment at the absence of certain encounters – totality stands out for me, as it’s clearly something handled less than convincingly in the post-modern canon, and continues to be a bit embarrassing for those who want both explanatory theory and post-modernism – and my defensiveness about the rough treatment given to Jameson, this collection is outstanding. It’s an appropriately good-humoured farewell to Niall Lucy (who does all the ‘M’ entries, and very nicely indeed – in particular, ‘Metanarrative’ and ‘Modernism’), and is an opinionated but also very warm exercise in re-enchanting theory . . . a very valuable addition to a field I’d imagined was largely done.

Present-Day Spiritualities: Contrasts and Overlaps

for wisdom. This monistic ‘flattening’ is also carried over into views of human nature and the afterlife. Among most SBNR, traditional doctrines of inherited sin and a forensic afterlife are rejected outright in favour of notions of ‘karmic’ justice and reincarnation. In Chapter 9, Mercadante offers some conclusions and considers the implications of the rise of the SBNR. In the face of the uncharitable stereotype, she insists that, in their attempts to find meaning and purpose in their lives and a strategy for living, the SBNR are necessarily ‘theological’. The author’s research demonstrates that they can, and usually want, to give an account of the beliefs they have, even if these beliefs are inchoate and inconsistent in the view of the traditionally religious. For the churches, the one potential point of contact and critique with the SBNR may centre on the question of whether it is possible to be truly ‘whole’ unless one can belong in ways that have historically engendered the kind of commitment to the common good redolent of religious institutions.

To the Western Isles: The Visions of Goffman and Synge

The need to secure a defining image and to lay out a disciplinary domain arises most pressingly in introductory textbooks. Responding to a query, ‘what is sociology?’ Macionis and Plummer (2005: 4) defined it as ‘a form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing the social’. Sociology sees in two ways that underline its particular ocular powers. At one end lies observer participation. It offers systematic discernments chronicled in a disinterested manner well fitted to meet claims for scientific respectability. At the other end, the hidden depths of culture are noted, but sociology claims to itself a capacity to reveal what the ill-disposed conceal. Thus, in the defining image sociology sets for itself, the discipline portrays itself as laden with ocular gifts. All pertaining to the social belongs to its gaze, and what the eye of perception will not reveal, the prophetic powers of sociological analysis will disclose.

Ocular Gifts: Seeing the Invisible in the Visible

The friar(s) who occupied cell 7 in the Dominican convent of San Marco in the middle of the fifteenth century might seem to have few claims to fame. It is the cell itself that is famous, however, for it contains a fresco painted by Fra Angelico, The Mocking of Christ He painted frescoes in the convent cells for friars, novices and lay brothers in a series of works of great beauty. The frescoes were instruments for emulation. They were set to enable the members of the order to pray, to meditate and to realise a metanoia, a conversion of character, to seek to see within in interior prayer and contemplation. The frescoes were amongst the few outlets for visual relief in an ascetic regime where the eyes might need some consolation, some windows of hope for life beyond one of interminable regulation and discipline.