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Charles Taylor - A Secular Age, Session 2
SESSION TWO: (6/22)
When Margaritas replace a Speaking God: Ministering to people whose
lives are framed by immanence as opposed to transcendence
MEMBER READING: A Secular Age, Chapters 15 & 16
VIDEO LECTURES: A More Adequate Narrative of Western Secularity
Secular 0 - xSecular 1 - a public faith vs a private faithSecular 2 - who is or isn't religious? Going by the numbersSecular 3 - All faiths come under fire from society
The Immanent Frame v Fragilization of Faith
Characteristics:
There is a loss of transcendence... it becomes displaced
An irreverence has taken place - it no longer matters if we are a saint or a sinner; the things which keep me up at night is no longer a fear of God, heaven, or hell but how people see me, or how I struggle for meaning in life.
How does one recover a sense of transcendent humanism? Where life is more than an unappreciated thing but a holy keep precious and mysterious.
How do we recover those existential moments which may propel me beyond my deep anxieties in life?
Religion seems to hold my identity back; it doesn't release me to be free to be myself but to cloak and mask myself instead. It closes my whole world down to where I hate everything.
There exists a double fragilization in life - Question: "Is there enough to compete with, or stand up to, our culture's cross pressure placed upon us?
We still carry burdens of guilt and bear a deep need for absolution for forgiveness.
When we get reflective "What is life for?"
Margaritas at the Mall - YouTube
by Purple Mountains
Lyrics
Drawn up all my findings
And I warn you they are candid
My every day begins
With reminders I've been stranded on this
Planet where I've landed
Beneath this gray as granite sky
A place I wake up blushing like I'm ashamed to be alive
How long can a world go on under such a subtle God?
How long can a world go on with no new word from God?
See the plod of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God
Trodding the sod of the visible with no new word from God
We're just drinking margaritas at the mall
That's what this stuff adds up to after all
Magenta, orange, acid green
Peacock blue and burgundy
Drinking margaritas at the mall
Standing in the shadows of the signpost on the road
50 gates of understanding, 49 are closed
Yes, I guess this time I really hit that number on the nose
What I'd give for an hour with the power on the throne
How long can a world go on under such a subtle God?
How long can a world go on with no new word from God?
See the plod of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God
Trodding the sod of the visible with no new word from God
We're just drinking margaritas at the mall
This happy hour's got us by the balls
Magenta, orange, acid green
Peacock blue and burgundy
Drinking margaritas at the mall
We're drinking margaritas at the mall
Drinking margaritas at the mall
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: David Berman
A Fiercer Delight and a Fiercer Discontent
Eclectic reflections on music, philosophy, theology and culture.
A Summary of a Summary:
James Smith on Charles Taylor...in charts and memes
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
James Smith[1] summarized Charles Taylor’s[2] A Secular Age, distilling a 900 page tome into a thin, accessible ~140 page volume...and also readable (Smith is a phenomenal writer with playful sensibilities who shares my love of 'cross-pressured' fiction). He called it How (Not) to be secular: Reading Charles Taylor.
It is a wonderful little book, that took me longer to read than most books three times its length, as I tried to inculcate the language and ideas. According to my custom, I tried to capture the more complex or helpful ideas into images.
Then I realized, I had a series of images that was essentially a pictorial summary of a 140 page text that was a summary of a 900 page text…
…a sort of reading James Smith reading Charles Taylor.
So why not post it? This blog has seen stranger, more obtuse content after all:
Role of Reform in Contemporary Social Imaginary
Here is Taylor's historical story of how we got to this cultural moment that could have been otherwise.
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Hubris of Inevitability
Smith/Taylor's emphasis on the non-inevitability of secularism reminded me of analogy in Gould's evolutionary narrative:
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Art as Meaning Refugia
And their assertion that secularization cannot be accounted for with the standard 'subtraction stories' but requires 'additions of meaning' to get to the current synthesis, 'inventing' 'art' as an end rather than a means, reminded me of this year's complicated Pulitzer (You'll have to wait until next weeks year end fiction summary for my take on the novel).
Where:
Art = an immanent space where we try to satisfy lost longing for transcendence…a ‘place for modern unbelief’ to live without settling for the utterly flattened world of mechanism or utilitarianism – but also without having to return to religion proper.”
The Francis Rorschach
The Francis Rorschach self-diagnoses pretheoretical unthoughts that predispose our 'secularization stories.'
Aspiration to Wholeness
‘Aspiration to wholeness’ was one of my favorite ideas - which takes two forms, depending on which way we've flattened our world. Those who major on the immanence of this world have to account for fullness, and those who major on transcendence have to affirm the ordinary (which has occupied much of my preaching lately, the transcendent frame has to make as much sense of immanence - work, romance, pain, tedium - as the immanent frame has to account for transcendence).
Epistemology Follows Ethics
Epistemology follows ethics regardless of worldview (note: the meme isn't meant to suggest mystery, but sequence. Biologically, the egg unequivocally precedes the chicken, laid by some evolutionary proto-chicken)
“Baseline moral commitments stand behind close world structures, specifically the coming of age metaphor of adulthood”
Taylor Summarized in an Equation
Of course, it wouldn't be a stanford summary without trying to express something analytically. Taylor argues that transcendence haunts us. It is the feeling that our experience and observation is not somehow divisible by 'The Closed Frame' of the secular subtraction stories or exclusive humanism.
Sure, we can make sense of beauty without reference to the transcendent, but is it parsimonious. At least it leaves us cross pressured, leaving a remainder of reductionism
The closed frame lacks “sufficient resources to account for fullness”...or, it is indivisible, leaving non-trivial remainders that require explanation for our synthesis to truly 'correspond with reality.'
The Long Middle
Human Porosity and the Buffered Self
“Malaise is itself one of the consequences of the buffered identity” 64
“The same “buffering” of the self that protects us also encloses us and isolates us…sealed off from enchantment the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance”
Insulation leads to isolation.
Excarnation
Four Eclipses of Exclusive Humanism
One of Taylor's central and most helpful ideas is that the subtraction stories of secularism (e.g. Dawkins God's =n-1), that what we have is the inevitable remainder of disenchanting the universe, is insufficient, mainly because we insisted that 'meaning' remain in our disenchanted universe. To retain meaning, we had to add something for everything we subtracted. So secularism was not so much a series losing but of eclipses, replacings.
This post was written while listening to The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
(Which Smith also claimed as the dominant soundtrack of his book, not only because its good writing music, but because it captures the cross-pressure of modernity so sublimely).
[1] Philosophy professor at Calvin
[2] Philosophy Professor at Toronto
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