ABSTRACT
This chapter is simultaneously an intellectual history and an investigation into John Carroll’s implicit understanding of culture. While not a conventional cultural theorist, this has been a unifying thread underlying his intellectual output, a project which invites a radical re-interpretation of the orientation of the sociological discipline. His Nietzschean emphasis on the vital importance of myth culminates in his enigmatic later work The Existential Jesus. This chapter argues that while a retrieval of the mythopoetic imagination is desirable, it also takes up the question of whether a return to the foundational mythical story of Western culture is ultimately possible.
