Dr Andrew McKinnon will deliver an invited, hybrid talk at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh on March 6.
In his paper, entitled 'Shailer Mathews’ Historical Sociology of God: Metaphors of the Divine and the Social Imaginary' Dr McKinnon will consider the questions, 'how does religion operate within relations of power?' and 'how should power relations within the religious imagination be conceptualised?'.
Democracy has not been a particularly fertile field for God metaphors
Building on his interest in how metaphors work, both in religious worlds, and in the study of religion, Dr McKinnon will turn to the question of why some metaphors predominate in religious discourse.
Centering the work of the (often overlooked) American sociologist and Protestant theologian, Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), Dr McKinnon will explore how people have always imagined their gods in terms drawn from their experience of their relations with human leaders.
By doing so, a parallel will be traced between the evolution of the state and the development of god-images, as evidenced by the history of Hebrew and Christian understandings of the divine from the 10th Century BCE through the 19th Century CE.
For more information on the talk, visit the events page.