Evolution of Worship & Religion: Part IV - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred (10)

The Evolution of Worship and Religion:

From Cosmic Awe to Processual Faith

A Metamodern Journey through the History of the Sacred

MODERNITY AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE SACRED

PART IV - ESSAY  10

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

In the beginning, there was wonder.

And wonder is where worship began.

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PART IV

SYNTHESIS & TRANSCENDENCE:

The Sacred Made Universal

Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions

• Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam as global movements of inner transformation.
• The humanization of divinity: compassion as the new sacred law.
• Mysticism, incarnation, and surrender as the universal triad of worship.
• Empires of faith and the paradox of universality and control.

Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred

• The Enlightenment’s rational rebellion against myth.
• Science, humanism, and secularization: new gods of reason.
• The disenchanted cosmos and the crisis of meaning.
• Nietzsche’s “death of God” as call to recreate the sacred from within.

Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred: Process, Panentheism, and the Pluriverse

• Whitehead, Teilhard, and the rediscovery of cosmic consciousness.
• Worship as participation in divine creativity, not obedience to decree.
• From anthropocentric religion to planetary spirituality.
• A metamodern synthesis: faith beyond dogma, reverence beyond creed.

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Essay 10

Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred

The Sacred did not vanish.

It withdrew from certainty.

Reason did not destroy the Sacred.

It exposed what could no longer

be believed unquestioned.

When the old heavens fell silent,

humanity learned from the sound

of its own questions -

that the death of God was not murder.

It was an awakening.

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Introduction: When Inheritance Became Questionable

The transition from the age of universal religions to the modern world was not marked by a single event, nor by a sudden loss of faith. It unfolded gradually, through the accumulation of questions that could no longer be silenced by appeal to authority alone. Traditions that had once offered orientation, meaning, and moral coherence now found themselves subjected to scrutiny - from within and without.

This shift did not arise from hostility toward the sacred. It arose from a growing demand for justification. Why should this text be trusted? Why this doctrine rather than another? Why should inherited belief outweigh observation, reason, or experience?

Modernity emerges at precisely this point: when meaning can no longer be assumed, when belief must answer to conscience, evidence, and historical awareness. What follows is not the disappearance of the sacred, but its eclipse - its obscuring by new ways of knowing the world that no longer require divine explanation to function.

The sacred, once woven into the fabric of cosmos and society, now appears displaced. The heavens grow silent not because reality has emptied of depth, but because the languages that once named that depth no longer command universal assent.

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I. The Enlightenment and the Rebellion Against Inherited Myth

The intellectual and cultural movement in Western Europe known as the Enlightenment (c.1688 to 1789/1815 CE) was characterized by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence, and the scientific method. The Enlightenment promoted ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights that consequently marked a decisive rupture in the history of human self-understanding. Its central impulse was not atheism, but critique. Thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought to free human reason from what they perceived as superstition, coercion, and unexamined tradition. Authority - whether ecclesial, monarchical, or scriptural - was no longer to be accepted merely because it had been handed down.

This rebellion against inherited myth did not begin as an attack on religion itself. Rather, it targeted unquestioned belief. "Divine revelation" was subjected to historical analysis. Scripture was read not only as sacred text, but as cultural artifact. Miracles were weighed against natural explanation. Dogma was tested against moral intuition.

In this climate, sacred belief ceased to function as a shared cosmological language and became instead a problem to be explained. What earlier ages had experienced as symbolic truth was increasingly interpreted as pre-scientific misunderstanding. The sacred narratives that once oriented humanity within a meaningful cosmos now appeared contingent, culturally bound, and historically situated.

Yet the Enlightenment’s critique carried an ethical aspiration. Reason was not elevated merely to dismantle belief, but to protect human dignity. Freedom of conscience, tolerance, and universal rights emerged as moral imperatives precisely because inherited authority could no longer be trusted to secure them. It occurred because of willfully imposed royal, state, and eccliesiastical tyranny and oppression over the centuries. In this sense, the Enlightenment’s challenge to religion was also a challenge on behalf of the human spirit.

Still, something essential was destabilized. When sacred belief is stripped of its symbolic depth and reduced to cultural/religious error, it loses its power to orient existence. When revelation is treated solely as historical data, it no longer speaks with existential force. The sacred begins to recede from perspectival reality - not because it has been disproven, but because it has been displaced by new epistemic standards for truth and reality.

The Enlightenment thus inaugurates a new condition: humanity stands before the world without guaranteed existential meaning. What once arrived through tradition must now be reconstructed through reason, experience, and shared inquiry. The burden of interpretation shifts decisively onto the human subject.

This shift will give rise to extraordinary achievements - scientific discovery, political reform, moral expansion. But it will also generate a quiet unease. For if meaning is no longer received, but made, the question arises: on what grounds shall meaning, identity, and purpose stand?

That question will shape the modern age - and its growing sense of disenchantment.

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II. Science, Humanism, and the New Absolutes

As the authority of inherited sacred belief weakened, new forms of trust rose to prominence. In the Age of Modernity, Science, reason, and (positively) humanistic ethics (sic, human rights) as versus folkloric beliefs, superstitions, and unsupportable mythic ideations, did not merely supplement older religious frameworks and regional traditions; they gradually assumed many of their cultural functions. They offered explanations of the cosmos, accounts of human origins, and visions of progress capable of organizing collective life without recourse to purported divine sanction under false arrangements.

*Modernity refers to the historical period and cultural shift after the Middle Ages, marked by a break from tradition, embracing rationality, science, individualism, industrialization, capitalism, secularism, and democracy, focusing on human reason to improve the world, though also bringing alienation and rapid change as after-affects by its presumptuous receipt and acclaim. It is characterized by belief in progress, complex bureaucratic systems, urbanization, mass communication, and a transition from community to society, defining much of our current world.

Science, in particular, transformed humanity’s relationship to the world. Nature was no longer primarily a theater of divine action, but a system governed by discoverable laws. Phenomena once attributed to spiritual agency - disease, weather, planetary motion - were increasingly understood through empirical investigation and mathematical description. The universe became intelligible in a new way: predictable, measurable, and open to manipulation.

This shift brought undeniable benefits. Knowledge expanded. Suffering was alleviated. Human life expectancy increased. The success of scientific explanation fostered confidence that reason alone could illuminate reality and guide human flourishing.

Yet as science explained more, it also challenged and displaced older sources of meaning. The cosmos revealed by modern physics and astronomy no longer appeared ordered toward moral or spiritual ends, questioning religious identity and teleology. It functioned efficiently, but silently. Purpose, once embedded in the structure of reality, now seemed absent - or at least irrelevant to scientific description.

Humanism as Moral Successor

In the wake of this epistemic transformation, humanism (sic, human potential, reason, and dignity) emerged as a moral framework capable of sustaining ethical concern without appeal to divine authority, that had eroded its earthly administrations through corruption, vice, and immoral oppression upon those the Church disagreed with. Human dignity, autonomy, and rights replaced obedience to Church and State, and salvation was reorganized according to the ideals of the moral, virtuous life in absence to any helpful explanation by the secularized Church.

*Humanism - an culturalized outlook or global system of thought attaching prime importance to human matters rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. This, in aversion to the enculturated church belief that men, women, and children were unworthy creatures to receive grace, mercy or help because of the view of imputed sin and fleshly corruption each one bore in their lives as taught by the Church, and consequently, treated meanly, abused, overlooked, or denied the commonest of human rights. The Enlightenment and Modernist eras worked to uplift humanity as beloved and worthy of dignity in its own right. Thus, a renewed Church instituted Christianized humanist teachings in light of this new spirit of grace and beatitude.

Jesus' Teachings on the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew 5.3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
4Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the Earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
7Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called the Sons of God.
10Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
11Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you..."

*Humanism inherited much of its perspective from the very universal religions it sought to transcend. Its concern for the vulnerable, its emphasis on compassion, and its vision of universal moral worth echo religious ethics even as they sever their theological roots. What changes is not the moral aspiration, but the source of its authority.

Where religion once grounded ethics in divine will or cosmic order, humanism grounds it in shared human experience and rational agreement. Moral responsibility becomes a function of empathy, social contract, and collective reason rather than sacred command.

This transition represents both continuity and rupture. It preserves the ethical gains of the religious past while rejecting its depleted metaphysical scaffolding. In doing so, it places humanity in a new position: responsible not only for moral action, but for the moral justification of humanity by not only its internal worth but by its acts and actions towards one another and to nature itself.

The Deification of Reason

Over time, reason itself begins to assume an absolute role. Objectivity, progress, and efficiency become values beyond question. Technological capability was increasingly equated with moral advancement (which, in hindsight, has become its own false non sequitur - a logical fallacy where the conclusion drawn cannot be so simply supported by the original premise or assumption). What can be done is often assumed to be what should be done.

This subtle deification of reason mirrors earlier religious absolutisms. Where divine decree once silenced dissent, scientific authority can now marginalize moral critique. Questions of meaning, value, and purpose are dismissed as subjective or unscientific, unworthy of serious consideration.

The sacred does not disappear in this process. It migrates to a presumed new authority. Progress replaces providence. History substitutes for eschatology. Humanity becomes both subject and object of salvation.

Yet unlike traditional religion, these new absolutes lack rituals of humility, confession, or surrender. Reason knows how to expand, but not how to bow. As a result, modernity achieves unprecedented power while remaining uncertain about how - or whether - it should be used.

This tension marks the beginning of disenchantment: a world rich in explanation but poor in meaning, powerful in capacity but fragile in purpose.

It is to this condition—to the felt absence of depth in an otherwise intelligible universe—that we now turn.

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III. Disenchantment and the Crisis of Meaning

The aftereffects of modernity included profound technological interconnectedness, economic growth, and scientific advancement, but also significant downsides like environmental degradation, increased individual alienation and social fragmentation, cultural erosion, heightened inequality, rise of mass media, and new forms of control/surveillance, creating a complex reality of both progress and deep-seated challenges that societies now grapple with. 

As scientific explanation and rational organization reshaped the modern world, a subtle transformation took place in humanity’s experience of reality. The universe, once encountered as animated, symbolically charged, and morally textured, increasingly appeared morally apathetic, harsh or neutral - as governed by laws indifferent to human longing. This condition, famously described by Max Weber as disenchantment (Entzauberung), marks not the destruction of meaning but its relocation beyond the visible structure of the world.

In a disenchanted cosmos, events no longer carry intrinsic significance. They occur according to causal necessity rather than symbolic intention. The heavens no longer speak. Nature no longer reveals moral order. The world functions, but it does not address us.

Positively, for many, this shift is liberating. Disenchantment frees humanity from fear of capricious gods and from the oppressive weight of sacred hierarchy. It allows critical thought, technological mastery, and personal autonomy to flourish. Negatively, the same process that dissolves superstition also erodes the frameworks through which human life once felt cosmically situated.

Meaning, once discovered, must now be reconstructed upon new basis of belief and experience even as civil, regional, and global wars expanded apace.

The Fragmentation of Experience

Without a shared sacred canopy, human experience fragments. Work, ethics, politics, and private belief operate according to different logics, often without integration. The modern individual inhabits multiple worlds simultaneously - scientific, economic, aesthetic, moral - none of which claims ultimate authority over the whole.

This fragmentation produces a distinctive form of anxiety. Life may be efficient, even prosperous, yet feel directionless. Progress advances without clarity about its ends. Freedom expands while responsibility grows heavier.

The question “What is true?” ---> gives way to the more unsettling question ---> “What is worth living for?”

Religion, when it found a way to persist, often did so in traditionalized or nostalgic forms - removed from public discourse, insulated from critique, or reduced to identity rather than conviction. For others, it collapses entirely, leaving behind a vacuum that neither science nor humanism fully fills.

Existential Responses

The crisis of meaning provoked by disenchantment gives rise to diverse responses. Some seek refuge in romanticized pasts, reviving mythic or nationalist forms of identity. Others turn inward, embracing therapeutic or expressive individualism. Still others embrace nihilism, concluding that the universe offers no grounds for value beyond personal preference.

Existential philosophy articulates this condition with clarity and urgency. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre describe a world in which meaning is no longer given but demanded. The human being stands alone before a presumed indifferent cosmos, tasked with choosing values without guarantee.

This confrontation is both terrifying and generative. It exposes the fragility of inherited meaning, but also reveals the depth of human freedom. The collapse of external authority forces a reckoning with responsibility: if meaning is to exist, it must be lived into being.

*Existentialism's era spans the 19th and 20th centuries, emerging as a philosophy in the 1800s with thinkers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it gained major cultural prominence as a cohesive movement in mid-20th century Europe (around 1930s-1950s), especially after WWII, fueled by disillusionment and a focus on individual freedom, meaning, and responsibility in a seemingly absurd world, with Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir as key figures. 

The Silence That Remains

Disenchantment does not eradicate the sacred impulse. It leaves behind a silence - a space where reverence once resided. Many experience this silence not as emptiness, but as absence. Something has withdrawn, leaving traces but no assurances.

In this silence, the modern world oscillates between mastery and despair. Humanity knows how to explain the world, but not how to belong within it. The sacred, once embedded in cosmic order, now appears displaced beyond reach.

It is at this point - when the old gods no longer speak and the new absolutes fail to satisfy - that Friedrich Nietzsche enters the modern imagination. His proclamation of the “death of God” does not celebrate loss; it names a condition humanity has not yet learned how to bear.

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IV. Nietzsche and the Burden of Meaning-Making

When Friedrich Nietzsche declares that “God is dead,” he is not announcing a triumph of atheism nor indulging in provocation for its own sake. He is naming a historical and psychological condition: the collapse of the metaphysical and moral frameworks that had silently structured Western life long after explicit belief had begun to wane.

The death of the Sacred, for Nietzsche, is not a murder committed by science or philosophy alone. It is the delayed consequence of centuries of intellectual exploration. The Enlightenment’s devotion to truth, once turned inward upon its own foundations, dissolves the very absolutes that once authorized it. Humanity had learned to question everything - except the (dire) implications of its very necessary questionings.

Nietzsche’s insight is devastating in its clarity: modern humanity had dismantled its highest values but continued to live as if they still held. Moral language persisted without metaphysical grounding. Purpose was still assumed without cosmic orientation. The result was not liberation, but drift.

Nihilism as Transition, Not Destination

Nietzsche identifies nihilism not as a final worldview, but as an unavoidable passage. When inherited meanings collapse, the initial response is exhaustion, cynicism, or despair. Nothing seems worth affirming because nothing appears anchored in necessity.

*Existential nihilism asserts that life is inherently meaningless and lacks any higher purpose. Hence, all individual and societal achievements are ultimately pointless which can lead to indifference, lack of motivation, and existential crisis.

Yet Nietzsche does not linger in negation. His concern is not the loss of God, but the refusal to accept the responsibility that follows. If meaning is no longer guaranteed by divine command or cosmic order, then humanity must become answerable for the values it lives by.

This demand is terrifying. It removes all alibis. There is no external authority to blame, no eternal order to hide behind. The question is no longer “What has been commanded?” but “What shall we affirm?”

In this sense, Nietzsche is not the destroyer of the sacred, but its most severe diagnostician. He exposes the danger of half-belief - of clinging to moral absolutes while denying the conditions that once sustained them. His critique forces modernity to confront its own incompleteness.

The Call to Create

Nietzsche’s response to nihilism is not despair, but creativity. The human task, as he sees it, is the creation of values that affirm life in the absence of metaphysical guarantees. This is not relativism, but responsibility at its most demanding.

The Act of Creation does not mean arbitrary invention. It requires attentiveness to life’s conditions, to suffering and flourishing, to strength and vulnerability. Values must be tested not by tradition alone, but by their capacity to sustain life honestly and courageously.

This call marks a decisive shift in the religious imagination. The sacred can no longer be inherited uncritically. It must be rearticulated - or it will be replaced by substitutes less humane and less (humanly) reflective.

Yet Nietzsche’s vision remains incomplete. He names the burden, but offers no shared horizon within which creative meaning might be sustained beyond heroic individualism. The danger he perceives - that nihilism will give way to domination, resentment, or despair - will indeed haunt the twentieth century.

What remains unresolved is whether meaning can be recreated without reverting to absolutism, and whether reverence can return without surrendering freedom.

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V. A World Left Open

The lengthy Age of Modernity (c.1500 to the present) does not conclude the religious story; it suspends it. By dissolving inherited certainty, it clears a space - one that can be filled by nihilism, by abject/inhumane power, or by new forms of positive or negative depth gained through many sources.

The eclipse of the sacred is not its extinction. It is a withdrawal from unquestioned authority, from cosmologies that can no longer bear the legitimate weight of historical and scientific awareness. What remains is an open world: intelligible, fragile, and unfinished.

In this openness, humanity faces a choice. Meaning can be reduced to utility, identity, or control. Or it can be reimagined as participation, responsibility, and creative response to a reality that exceeds mastery.

Here, in Essay 10, we mark a passage rather than a conclusion. It exposes the limits of both religious absolutism and secular sufficiency. It leaves the sacred neither affirmed nor denied, but unhoused, untethered, incomplete - awaiting a form capable of honoring freedom, plurality, and becoming.

The question that remains is no longer whether the sacred exists, but how it might be rearticulated in a world that knows too much to believe naively and cares too deeply to live without meaning.

It is to that rearticulation - to the rebirth of the sacred within an evolving, relational cosmos - that the final essay (no. 11) we now turn.

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Transition to Essay 11

If the universal religions carried the sacred inward, and modernity stripped it of inherited certainty, then what remains is the possibility of a sacred that arises not from command or myth, but from participation in the unfolding of reality itself.

Essay 11 will explore that possibility.

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~ Continue to Part IV, Essay 11 ~

Evolution of Worship & Religion

• Introduction
• Maps, Tables & Data
• A Proposed Outline
• Resources

• Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
• Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
• Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem

• Part II - The Age of Gods
• Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
• Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
• Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism

• Part III - Axial Awakenings
• Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
• Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
• Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason

• Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
• Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
• Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
• Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred

• Part V - Conclusion of Series
• Essay 12 - A Processual Summation of Worship and Religion
• Essay 13 - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power

• Part VI - Supplementary Materials
• 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
• 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
• 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
• 4 - How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God:
• Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
• Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
• Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
• 5 - The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible:
• From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
• Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
• Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
• 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
• 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
• 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
• 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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I. The Enlightenment, Reason, and the Critique of Tradition

• Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784). In Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.

• Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford University Press, 2001.

• Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

• Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vols. 1–2. W. W. Norton, 1966–1969.

• Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press, 1989.

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II. Science, Rationality, and Secularization

• Galileo, Galilei. Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. (1615).

• Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. (1637). Hackett Publishing.

• Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962.

• Weber, Max. Science as a Vocation. (1917). In From Max Weber, Oxford University Press.

• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.

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III. Disenchantment, Secularization, and Modern Consciousness

• Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 1930.

• Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. Anchor Books, 1967.

• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

• Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton University Press, 1997.

• Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Harcourt, 1957.

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IV. Existentialism, Meaning, and the Crisis of Value

• Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. (1843). Penguin Classics.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. (1882). Vintage Books.

• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (1883–1885). Penguin Classics.

• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage, 1955.

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Yale University Press, 2007.

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V. Humanism, Ethics, and Moral Responsibility

• Dewey, John. A Common Faith. Yale University Press, 1934.

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.

• Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Polity Press, 2003.

• MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

• Nussbaum, Martha. Creating Capabilities. Harvard University Press, 2011.

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VI. Religion After Certainty (Bridges Forward)

• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. SCM Press, 1953.

• Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. Yale University Press, 1952.

• Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Beacon Press, 1967.

• Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Stanford University Press, 1999.

• Westphal, Merold. Suspicion and Faith. Fordham University Press, 1998.

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VII. Proto-Process and Post-Secular Thought

(A Prelude to Essay 11)

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1925.

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Fordham University Press, 1926.

• Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism. Cornell University Press, 2001.

• Clayton, Philip. The Problem of God in Modern Thought. Eerdmans, 2000.

• Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible. Columbia University Press, 2015.