ABSTRACT
The final chapter, Chapter 10, looks at postmodern sociology, which has had a profound influence in sociology. Postmodernisms’ major theorists, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudlillard, and Pierre Bourdieu have called for the discarding of all worldviews or metatheories as ideologies. They embrace relativity and disdain standards of judgments as the result of human social constructions with no value outside of the humans who created them. Their views have been instrumental in producing a sociology that embraces nihilism and strips individuals of their humanity. Postmodernist sociology quite simply embraces power as the defining explanation of human behavior.
As an alternative to postmodern sociology, the sociological theories of critical realists Margaret Archer and Christian Smith are analyzed. These two sociological theorists show how by incorporating Critical Realism with the spiritual aspects of what it means to be a person, sociology can be more than a discipline that sees people shaped by a deterministic social structure. In sum, it is contended that by reintroducing Christianity into sociology, its original promise can be reclaimed.
