Post Secularism

• Religion & Politics

  I've found it useful to think about any society as having three separate but interpenetrating spheres–cultural, political, and economic. Long-time readers of this blog are familiar with my use of the terms, but I thought they might be worth revisiting because I want to use them later as a way of talking about pluralism and

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• Cosmogenesis I

  I mentioned the other day that I was reading Wink's The Powers that Be in which he talks about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he traces back to the  primal, viciously violent battle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian cosmogonic myth. And at some point I want to come back

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• Some Post-Secularist Thoughts

  I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future–it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to

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• Does Christianity Have a Future?

  We are all postmoderns now, and that means anything goes. The premodern, traditionalist narrative remains only a ghostly presence, and the modern Enlightenment Rationalist narrative persists merely as an old habit that we maintain for want of anything better. In such a cultural gray zone, people have shown themselves capable of believing in almost anything,

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• From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen

  I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed form all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith;

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• Zombie Traditionalism III

  What we all want is life. And this discussion about living vs. zombie traditionalism is really a discussion about how culture helps us to live or gets in the way of our living well.  A vibrant culture is one in which people are alive–deeply, richly alive. Not just physically healthy, but alive in the soul,

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• Zombie Traditionalism II

  For me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In a premodern culture people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in a modern culture in a chosen world–or at least in a world where choices are forced upon

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• Part V: Post Scatological Ruminations

  Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso. Thanks to  Dave Shack for sending the following quote by Frederick Buechner in response to my "House" post.  I think it gets at Luther’s neither here nor there status of human beings very nicely: I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to

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• Part IV: House, The Purgatorio Man

  If you’ve been following the logic of the three preceding pieces on Original Sin, it should be clear that there is no necessary moral difference between being naughty or nice.  Being nice means for the most part being well socialized, which has the  moral equivalence of being potty trained.  Being nice is what we are

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• Part III: Ideas Matter

  My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the mental framework I have developed over the years.  It contrasts dramatically with the mental framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing

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