“O senseless and foolish people, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” That would seem to be Kieran Flanagan’s verdict on liberal theologians in The Enchantment of Sociology, though the accused are not named or their unhappy deeds documented by textual reference. As a class they are those who appear to accept the sociological mode of social scrutiny while resolutely avoiding its clear implications, whereas their traditionally-minded opponents appear to reject sociology and all its works while putting forward essentially sociological arguments. Flanagan suggests that one reason liberal theologians are so disoriented in their understanding is because their location in the secular university has made them strangers to the body of the Church. He, on the other hand, is enabled both to see and to hear because he is a stranger and an alien in the body of English society. He walks in our supermarkets and our semi- secularised cathedrals assisted by distance to envisage the true nature of the secular challenge and a possible response.

One response is to find unmarked (and unremarked) theological clues scattered in the detritus of postmodemity. At the end of the line in the trajectory of modernity we may discern again our beginnings. As sociology seeks sources of enchantment to reverse the chill closure of Weber’s “iron cage” it may also stumble upon an unexpected preparation of the gospel.

The argument is that sociology can locate metaphors of the sacred and of theology lodged in the calculative, administered and commodified culture of postmodemity. The existence of such metaphors in itself points to a deficiency and to a vacancy at its heart where “superstition dances on the grave of positivism”.