Subversive Christianity
-
Quote of the Day: Thomas Edsall
"In God We Divide", by Thomas Edsall in today's NYT …the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).” Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton
-
Drift toward Authoritarianism
I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time
-
Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers
This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly
-
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,
-
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