ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 looks at how by the 1950s the Christian-based sociology of the early Chicago School was almost totally ignored as sociology fought to further legitimize itself in a culture fast becoming secular, and within higher education, which embraced almost wholeheartedly the materialistic view that science and measurement were the only avenues to understanding. With Positivism and value-freedom as its reigning research methodology, sociological theory began to explore a number of alternative theoretical frameworks, with most of the major ones, in one way or another, critiquing “the legacy of Positivism.”
Although there are numerous sociological theories that arose in the mid-twentieth century and that now comprise the lexicon of theoretical frameworks in sociology, in this chapter, only five are seen as major ones: Structural Functionalism (or Functionalism, for short), Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, Feminist Sociological Theory, and Critical Theory. These theories are analyzed from a Christian perspective, which sees them as contributing to a sociology that looks only at the materialistic nature of human beings, a sociology that has embraced meaninglessness and/or despair.
