Professor Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the Department of Religious Studies, has just had a series of six blog posts published by The Guardian‘s ‘Comment is Free’ section of its website. Part of a series on ‘How to Believe’, the posts draw on Professor Lynch’s research to explore how Emile Durkheim’s understanding of the sacred and the profane can help us to understand powerful moral sentiments that shape social life today. Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was first published 100 years ago.
This is part of an on-going project led by Professor Lynch, who has recently completed an AHRC Fellowship for work in this area. It involves original new theoretical and case study research, as well as a range of wider activities that take this research out to a wider public beyond the university.
The intellectual framework for this work comes from the works of Durkheim, as well as the work of cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. Professor Lynch’s current research takes the ideas of both of these scholars on board to provide a comprehensive account of the meaning of the sacred in the modern world.
Professor Lynch published his research last year in The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach (Oxford University Press, 2012). This book sets out a theoretical framework for using concepts of the sacred and the profane as tools for social and cultural analysis, situating this in a longer body of work in which Emile Durkheim, Edward Shils, Robert Bellah and Jeffrey Alexander have been leading contributors.
Distinguishing this approach from the ontological theories of the sacred suggested by writers such as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, the book presents a working definition of the sacred, explores how this can be used as an analytical concept and considers the kind of knowledge that is generated by this form of analysis.
The book also addresses further substantive questions: how might we understand the simultaneous presence of multiple sacred forms in social life, what is the sacred role of public media in the modern world, and is the sacred an inevitable element of social life?
To see the blog series, go to www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/series/how-to-believe