Catholics
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Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 3
Part 3: The Impersonal Order In Part 1, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about a social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but understanding its implications reinforces the idea I have written a lot about on this blog, which is the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is very provisional: humans did not always
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Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 2
Part 2. Reform: The Rage for Order Many societies have moments of 'reform', but Taylor wants to make the case that the rage for Reform in the Latin West was unique and was central to the emergence there of the secular society Westerners introduced to the world. As described in Part I, before the reform bug bit elites
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On Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 1
Part 1: Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the
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Francis and the Conservatives
Conservative culture warriors are concerned that the church is selling out to secular culture and should more forcefully be a sign of contradiction to it, and I agree that the Church must always be such a sign of contradiction; it must always play a subversive role in its relationship to the world of princes and
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More on the Pope’s Visit
This is a reflection on the pope's address to Congress and his address at St. Patrick's Cathedral mainly directed to nuns and priests. In the life of faith, as in any realm of human endeavor, there are prodigies, journeymen, and hacks. A hack is somebody who lives his life imitatively or derivatively, someone who adapts uncritically to
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A Word on the Pope’s Address to Congress
Maybe the sentiments of the woman who wanted to throw a shoe at him represent a larger proportion of those listening to his speech than you would otherwise be aware of, but I for one was deeply moved by this speech. In part it was the incongruity of this man in Renaissance garb talking to
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Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis
Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says: Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to
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Francis as the Vatican’s Gorbachev? (Updated)
Oh, I forgot. John 23rd was. The Vatican since then has been trying futilely to get back to the status quo ante, but the "Vatican Security System" has been in a slo-mo implosion mode since then. Things move a little more slowly in such ancient institutions. Anyway, this paragraph struck me in an article in
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Douthat on the Leftist Pope
But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions. That