AA chapter 9

At last! The final chapter is complete! I may have left it too long to get back to this after my Christmas reading, but it wasn't a difficult chapter to read, anyway. Now I can finally put last year's sociology to bed and get into this year's sociology.

The chapter, Religious Identity and Meaning in the Modern World, deals loosely with the future of religion, and also the future of the sociology of religion. It examines four forces in 'modern' Western society which may be seen as challenging or even dangerous to institutionalised religion:

• Consumerism
  
• Authority vs individuality, and the trend toward individualism
  
• Gender and sexuality issues
  
• The New Age
  

It strikes me that these are all characteristic of what I've learned to call post-modernism, not modern society at all. There seems to be some kind of hesitancy among established sociologists to refer to anything as 'post-modern'. Presumably this is because the term has been used somewhat glibly by some of the more radical members of the discipline, and has thus suffered from the familiar degeneration of definition [like 'cult']. This pedantry strikes me as a bit silly, though - that which supersedes the modern is clearly the post-modern, and it seems pretty clear that the social world around us is no longer purely, or even largely, a modernistic one.

Anyway. Regardless of how we label them, these four influences are all a part of our social world and all impact on religion in various ways. While examining specific cases of the impact of each on various religious movements, from the Catholic Church to the Baha'i faith, Aldridge makes no conclusive statement on the future of religion. Instead he reaches a typically sociological conclusion - that the four forces may have a negative impact on religion, but it may be less than we think, and in some ways they may actually have a positive impact instead. Which is all very nice and open-minded and wishy-washy. I don't think this is the first time I've used the term wishy-washy to describe Aldridge.

To be fair, it is a very light overview. It would probably be easy enough to come to a conclusion if one really wanted to, and if one put in the effort of doing good research in the area. The role of a sociology textbook is not to answer but to provoke questioning, and Aldridge is certainly a great book for that purpose.

I've found this interesting effect with blogging about each chapter of the textbook - it makes me revise the chapter. Sound familiar, boys and girls? Just what you're always promising yourself you'll do, right? Read the chapter, take some notes, summarise it, revise it. But it never happens, does it? Well, guess what. It does now!

Never fear, I'm not going to blog about every single boring course reading I have to do this year. Just the ones that turn me on. Which are the only ones I will really need to revise, so that's all good :)

Only four more Fridays until I go BACK TO UNIVERSITY!!