Post Secularism
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Meaning as Connection
The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is more than I feel capable of getting into, so I would like just to work with a simpler more seat of the pants understanding of what makes our experience meaningful. The key word is “connection,” and how things connect
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The Fundamental Task Is Cultural Not Political
The parameters for the possible in politics are determined by the culture’s spiritual infrastructure. Both political liberalism and conservatism offer nothing because they are both products of an obsolete (or decadent) cultural configuration. The forms remain, like cadavers, but spirit and life are long departed from them. Along thesle lines read this very good short
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Walker Percy’s Postmodern Catholicism
Why was he a Catholic? Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer." In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or
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Cultural Identity II
In my post the other day, my fundamental point was that too many, probably most, people who call themselves Christian tend to look at the Gospel message through their tribal filters rather than to look at their tribal culture and its presuppositions through a Christian filter. No one is able completely to transcend the culture
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Retrieval of an Unflattened Wor(l)d
Let’s take a break from politics, shall we? I’m back to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I wanted to focus on this important idea about how the redemption of language is the path to the redemption of experience: . . . in the post-Romantic context, the complaint is often made that language as we
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Disembedding and Theosis
And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head. Luke 9:58 I've recently seen two films–"Into the Wild" and "Beowulf"–that both in their different ways are stories of human folly and human heroism, but each in
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Human Flourishing
Taylor makes an important distinction between what he calls older religions and the "higher" or post-Axial Religions. This term comes from what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, that period in the first millennium BCE when various higher forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates,
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The Weather Gods in a Disenchanted Cosmos (expanded)
I’d like to say that I find [Georgia] Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s
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Zombie Traditionalism
Ed: I'm reposting this piece from 2005 which newer readers may not have ever read because of its congruence with the last post about The Zeitgeist of Unbelief: To me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former people live
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Getting after the Future
I’ve been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor’s new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns. By social imaginary he means a culture’s collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in