Today I had the pleasure of reading the Pope's speech that was given at the University of Regensburg (you know, the one that was notoriously anti-Islam??) Well, it wasn't anti-Islam at all and in fact, the speech was entirely about the integration of faith and reason in the academy and the comment about Islam was one brief introductory example of the long-standing debate about the role of reason in religion. Anyway....

This one quote really stuck out at me:

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures".

I found this to be a very simple yet profound polemic against the over-reliance on scientific reason, and the use of reason as a means to exclude moral/normative/religious discussion from the mainstream academy.

It stuck out at me because I find this to be a very relevant issue in my discipline. As a "science of man", I think that sociology almost entirely fails to attend to the fact that for the majority of humans, there is some kind of orientation to a notion of some divinity, even if that divinity is a vacuous commitment to some kind of arbitrary ethic. More specifically, my discipline utterly fails to attend to the rich notions of humanity and human agency that are found in religious dialogue. As such, I think the rampant appeal to reason in the social sciences makes it incapable of entering into the dialogue about humanity - and I'll lay my cards on the table and say that I think sociology is better viewed as a humanities subject than as "social science." There ya go.

What do you think?