"Differences, Inequalities and the Sociological Imagination". Prague. Esa 2015 12th Conference of the European Sociological Association

How far does God endure with the arts? ABSTRACT What could a member of the Florida’s creative class have to share with the mentality of a citizen of the Middle Ages? It might be, among other points, a different degree of sophisticated symbolic knowledge, able to guide individuals through anthropological no less than sociological imagination, to distinguish in a very tangled forest of meanings, including religious ones. It is indeed a very huge object, in our contemporary culture, where the symbolic aspects of these peculiar meanings are at the same time social and political, to learn how to correctly interpret the strength and the inner potential power of these vehicles of expression. They can act, as a matter of fact, following an identical chemical formula, as poison or medicine. The recent tremendous results of what the misunderstanding of the use and interpretation of religious symbols is able to produce is in front of the whole world. While the empire of the West has greatly overestimated its own economic destinies, underestimating those of the so-called third and fourth world, a new war is being waged against it, focused on the paradoxical power of religious symbols or underestimated. symbols. Following a monologic rather than dialogic method, the West foolishly failed cultural self-reflexivity and forgot to properly apply the 3T theory (Florida 2002) as much as that of 3C (Carta 2007) to other cultures. This serious lack sparked off frantic reactions from fundamentalist cultures, no less retrograde than liberticide. The relationship between art forms and use of religious symbols becomes thus not free since it can not be rationalized.