Christian Humanism

The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end.
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Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking
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A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe
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Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be
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Moral vs. Moralistic

There's a difference, of course, but it's not one most of us think about much. A moral person is wise and compassionate; a moralistic person is a judgmental prig. The crux of the difference lies in that being moral requires an ability to suss out what the right thing to do is–it's a matter of
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History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?–Blaise Pascal The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs.
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The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

Terry Eagleton's book, Culture and the Death of God runs parallel to the parts of Taylor's book that trace out the West's march toward secularism and the possibility for atheistic humanism. Eagleton's book, however, starts at the Enlightenment and focuses more on the history of ideas than in changes to the social imaginary. It's a dynamic process, of course,
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Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 4

Part 4: The Anthropocentric Turn Let's sum up what we've presented in Parts 1 – 3. Part 1 focused on the process of disembedding from the premodern enchanted social and cosmic imaginary to one that is thoroughly disembedded and disenchanted. This disembedding process has produced the buffered selves that we have become and the radically secular society
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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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