In Taylor’s Introduction, he lays out three secularities. The first two are other people’s interests. The third is his own.

1. “The first [secularism] concentrates on the common institutions and practices–most obviously, but not only, the state. The difference [between secular and non-secular societies] would then consist in this, that whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection…” (Taylor 1-2).

This first secularism becomes more fascinating later as Taylor goes on to talk about the boundedness of all systems in secular thought. At one time (as above) members of a society could not understand themselves without reference to something outside themselves (not only the divine, but one another, and the world around them). Today, not only does political theory need no reference to some form of “ultimate reality;” but an individual human being is self-created, without the help of background, family, tradition, larger society, let alone God (Hauerwas in my head: “The story of modernity is the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story”); and contemporary scientific cosmology certainly has no need to refer to anything beyond that which is study-able (aside from all those different universes out there).

2. “In this second meaning, secularity consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church” (Taylor 2).

This is the most common understanding of secularism as we use the word in conversation, whether we see secularization as human progress toward a more enlightened and less superstitious future or we see it as something to be mourned and resisted.

[Aside: Perhaps most fascinating about this quote to me is that Taylor capitalizes "Church." Thus far, Taylor does not seem to want to be doing theology, but he slips into it sometimes. Why not "no longer going to church?" It's an argument in the form of a capitalization. Yes, Taylor is Roman Catholic.]

3. “Now I believe that an examination of this age as secular is worth taking up in a third sense, closely related to the second, and not without connection to the first. This would focus on the conditions of belief. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace. In this meaning, as against sense 2, at least many milieux in the United States are secularized, and I would argue that the United States as a whole is. Clear contrasts today would be the majority of Muslim societies, or the milieux in which the vast majority of Indians live” (Taylor 3).

This “conditions of belief” is a fascinating term, because it means that secularism is about how we experience life, not just how we theorize about it. It sets the tone for the rest of the book too. Can Taylor convince us that he is able to get inside the hearts, minds, and lives of the pre-Moderns and that he understands in the same way those of us living in the West today? (For me, 90 pages in, YES.)

I have traveled and lived and still travel and still live in circles where secularism is a problem, and a scary one. There are theological aspects, spiritual aspects, sociological aspects, political aspects to this, and to draw a Venn diagram would not work. But I can outline some of them.

In case any of the following beliefs sound fringe-y, they are not. You have your lawn mowed, your mail delivered, your water meter read, your hair cut, your latte made, your paycheck signed by people who hold these beliefs. You are biologically related to and in many cases descended from people who hold these beliefs.

Yes, I do know and love and am loved by people who believe that it is illegal to pray in United States public schools in 2012. Some of these folks also believe that it is important to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that United States money is printed with “In God We Trust,” and that the central statement of the Pledge of Allegiance is “under God.”

The secularization of society for these groups of people is the transitioning of the United States into a post-Christian nation, a descent into godlessness and chaos. A secularized United States is terrifying, because there is no order without God’s order, which is Christian (or at least North Atlantic, Judeo-Christian-inspired) order.

There is a more critically considered version of this, which I’ll call the First Things-ian view of secularism. First Things is the magazine founded by John Richard Neuhaus, who marched with MLK, who authored one of the most brilliant books ever written on being a pastor (Freedom for Ministry), and whose last days were spent as a neo-con (or not quite that). First Things is basically the magazine through which well-considered conservative (and/or traditional) Judeo-Christian political thought travels. It’s a magazine that helps you think better, but which you might also find yourself throwing across the room in anger/mystification.

The First Things-ian argument is that secularization is the corroding of the traditional values which aid all human fluorishing. These values are shared and universal. (For a First Things thought from earlier today to illustrate this, click here. For a problematizing of the universal claims that the Christian religion makes and has made, click here.)

For me, discussing how I relate to secularism and secularization is one of those (many) areas where I feel my lack of a coherent and contiguous narrative of history. But here is my understanding, embedded in my sense of history: the United States is much more accurately described as a pagan culture than as a secular culture (or as “pre-pagan” rather than “post-Christian”). God and gods have not been removed from public discussion and society at all. Christianity was one among many cults in the religious marketplace at its beginning, and it is so today. This “new” world is not something to fear (as both groups described above would tend to believe, although the latter hides it better), but it is still God’s world, populated by God’s children, all of us in need of conversion by God’s love through Jesus Christ.

There are some differences between these worlds, 1st and 21st centuries, of course…

Charles Taylor argues that having no god is an option for large masses of people in a way that it has never been in human history. Or, as he puts it in his Introduction:

[T]he change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.

A friend of mine had the crazy idea that a group of people should read this very intimidating (776 pages of dense philosophy, history, critical theory, sociology, theology, and more plus 100 pages of endnotes) book together. When everyone weighed their lives, it ended up being just me and him.

You can certainly still hop on the train if this is interesting to you, however. Here’s one possible reading plan that Brian cooked up. I don’t know his personal rate of reading, but I’m going slightly faster than what you see below:

• Week 1  - Introduction 1-24
• Week 2 – Chapter 1 pt 1 25-bottom of page 75
• Week 3 – rest of chapter 1 till page 130
• Week 4 – finish chapter 2 and 3 158
• Week 5 – chapter 4 159-211
• Week 6 – chapter 5-6 212-269
• Week 7 – chapters 7 and 8 270-321
• Week 8 – chapters 9 and 10 322-376
• Week 9 – chapter 11 377-422
• Week10 – chapter 12  423-472
• Week 11 – chapter 13 and 14  473-537
• Week 12 – chapter 15 539-93
• Week 13 – chapter 16 through 656
• week 14 – rest of chapter 17 and 18 656-710
• Week 15 – remainder of the book

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My Blogs (Supposedly) on the Book:
1. Secularism and Me - Introducing my reading of the book by talking about my own background, about what secularism means to those in the American culture in which I grew up.

2. Secularities – Taylor defines “Secular” early on, so I will follow him.

Brian’s Blogs on the Book:
1. Why read “A Secular Age”? - Brian is much clearer than I am on that question. In part, he writes, ”My hope is that Taylor will help us understand better our own ‘situatedness’ that affects how we (the we is to be taken in the broadest sense) talk about Religion, transcendence,  and ethics and how Christians think about things like prayer, church authority, and the sacraments.”

And yet, Rick Santorum and I do agree on some things. Here’s one example, quoted from this Huffington Post article reporting on a Santorum event held earlier today:

I was so outraged by the president of the United States for standing up and saying every child in America should go to college. Well who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America should [go to college]? I mean, the hubris of this president to think that he knows what’s best.

I have seven kids. Maybe they will all go to college. But if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto-mechanic, good for him. That’s a good paying job: using your hands, using your mind. This is the kind of snobbery that we see from those who think they know how to run our lives. Rise up America, defend your own freedoms. And overthrow these folks who think they know how to orchestrate every aspect of your lives.

Well, for the first paragraph…I don’t really know what Obama said that Santorum is reacting to here. Did Obama in fact say that every kid should go to college or that every kid should have the opportunity to go to college? That’s a huge distinction.

I do know, however, that Obama has at times presented a fantasy US-centric future of the world in which we produce ideas and the rest of the world builds what we design. It’s not just fantasy (considering that the US is already an empire in decline only a handful of decades after it became the world’s greatest superpower); it’s offensive to the rest of the world which apparently has no ideas for us to manufacture. (What’s more, the “best” work doesn’t get our hands dirty, apparently.)

But it’s the second paragraph I quoted where I really like (some of) what Santorum’s saying. There I find something that Santorum and I both draw from our shared catholic faith (here I say catholic not Catholic, because he’s actually Roman, and I’m just an Anglican trying to fit in where I don’t actually want to be).

One American Dream that we lie to our kids about is that there is such a thing as a self-made man (yes, and he‘s white, too), and what’s more, that everyone can be a self-made man. It’s not just the lie of America, but the lie of democracy in general.

It is a lie because it’s not factually true: in the history of the earth there has never been a self-made anyone. It’s a damned lie because it damages people by telling them that their worth is based on their abilities and accomplishments. Such a world has no place for the average human being, let alone anyone with a profound disability.

To be clearer, even if Obama had actually said and meant, “Each and every child born in America ought to get a four-year accredited degree,” he was not at all saying, “And the people that don’t go to college have less worth and human value.” But, he would be offering a view of human worth which has no diversity and which does not understand that human worth at its most basic comes from human createdness.

We have a sacred worth that was not and cannot be earned and which can never be destroyed. That is what humanness is.

1 Corinthians 1:18: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

What’s the difference between foolishness and absurdity? Perhaps there is none, but perhaps there’s something to be learned from existentialism. And certainly there’s something to be learned from those who suffer: So my suffering is unending and God’s response is not to end it but to also suffer?!

Paul may call the Gospel ‘foolish,’ whether you believe it or not you may call it ‘stupid,’ but ‘absurd’ captures it even better for me.

I had been leaning toward buying Richard Rohr’s Preparing for Christmas and then I went in a very different direction when some Facebook friends let me know that Adam Hamilton had a new Advent devotional (The Journey) out, and it was free for Kindle. (Yes, I believe Richard Rohr and Adam Hamilton are both among the best living Christian teachers.)

Aside from my interest in the past couple years of reading an Advent devotional in Advent and a Lenten devotional in Lent (mostly because I am still barely getting a clue what these seasons are about), I also stole from some monks (from monk-kind, none of whom I know personally) the idea of always reading devotional literature alongside Scripture.

On top of that, I have a theory (not a unique theory, but one I didn’t learn in seminary) that Christian theology is not Christian theology if it isn’t done devotionally. So I read some stuff devotionally that most people don’t want to read at all.

Layer on layer on layer, I’m currently devotionally reading Psalms, Proverbs, Luke (which may have just become my most-personally-connected-with-Gospel, replacing John), Adam Hamilton, the Apostolic Fathers (Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch in the past couple days), and…Simone Weil’s Waiting for God.

I say “…” because that’s all this post is about. I continue wanting to write something about the Occupy Movement. (Is it already dead as of this writing?) At the same time, I realized this morning how much I still have to learn about the transfigurative properties of Advent when it didn’t occur to me until 100 pages in that a book entitled and about Waiting for God is exactly about Advent.

These two things (Advent and OWS’s call for justice) are connected. Waiting for God, for Christians, is the heart of Advent, is waiting for the coming of the Kingdom of God, which is the coming of Peace, Love, and Justice. Simone Weil understands this (from her essay, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” in Waiting for God):

Christ does not call his benefactors [in "The Parable" (we hope) of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46] loving or charitable. He calls them just. The Gospel makes no distinction between love of our neighbor and justice…We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice dispenses him who possesses from the obligation of giving.

Do you have an Advent devotional this year? Think of Weil’s words. Hold them up before God. Wait…and hope.

Believing is Seeing is not so much about photography as it is about whether objectivity is possible (or desirable), about what and how and whether we can know, about history and memory, about how our expectations create our observations in things small and enormous. It’s not even that I agree with all his arguments (and, in fact, I found myself dissatisfied at the end of perhaps half of his photo essays), but he is an original thinker who helps others think, and that makes this book worth reading and re-reading.

There are six essays, each based around a photograph or set of photographs which have caused problems of interpretation, often with the help of mass media, but just as often with the help of historians and other scholars. Then Morris gathers interviewees and experts and other data and begins thinking through the puzzle.

The photography is great, the history is great, the interviewees are great, the anecdotes are great, the analysis is great, the prose is great. What more do you want? Excerpts?:

I also remember reading an account of October 28, 1962–the last night of the Cuban missile crisis, when many knowledgeable people thought the world would end. Khrushchev had not yet capitulated and Kennedy was poised for nuclear war. Khrushchev was in Moscow, Kennedy in Washington. We know what Khrushchev was doing from the accounts written by his son, Sergei. Khrushchev was so worried about the possibility of nuclear war that he spent a sleepless night and then announced his decision to remove the missiles from Cuba over Radio Moscow the following morning so that it could be broadcast to the entire world without delay. On the same night, Kennedy was down by the White House pool with his aide, Dave Powers, and two girlfriends watching Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. What a story. Hepburn, heir to some unspecified throne, dreams of being free of the obligations of state, but in the end knows she must return to the requirements of the monarchy. That die, too, was cast. It was a fantasy within a fantasy within the reality of the White House.

and, in a later essay…

A photograph can capture a patch of reality, but it can also leave a strange footprint: an impression of an instantly lost past around which memories collect.

The best way to get a taste of this book also happens to be about JFK. Last week, on the anniversary of the President’s assassination, Errol Morris created a short documentary for The New York Times called “The Umbrella Man.” The way the documentary winds around, altering your mind and surprising you in the process, is the way each essay in this book works.

Here’s the link to the NY Times “Op-doc.” Here’s the link to buy Morris’ book. Here’s the link to his website. Get clickin.’

There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

That’s the opening paragraph of Anatomy of a Disappearance. Good writers go their whole lives without writing sentences like those. Hisham Matar wrote a novel-full (at least one, as I haven’t yet read his In the Country of Men).

When I first heard about this book, it was being spun as a literary mystery novel, which is dead wrong. A different author might have written that 700-page political thriller, but this is a dream and a meditation on the question raised in that opening paragraph:

What does it mean to live when your whole life is an elegy for a missing man, one whom you might never really have known?

It’s not a question with which intense wrestling accomplishes more than sweat and injury. But the “answer” seems to be that if your life is an elegy, then you live, and that is your answer. And if you’re a writer, you write. In Anatomy of a Disappearance, narrator Nuri el-Alfi’s father is a wealthy political dissident who is kidnapped while abroad in Switzerland. The book’s author’s own father was an anti-Gaddafi activist who disappeared from Cairo in 1990, apparently by pro-Gaddafi forces. The narrator tries to live, and the author writes.

While it’s tempting to think that there must be a close correlation between this novel’s protagonist and its author, that’s misleading. I know this because not every survivor of a terrible crime can write. Read this book. It’s what fiction is meant to be.

As for me, I’ve already reserved Matar’s first novel from the library.

-Comment I————————————————–

In describing why he is an evangelical, and why the “tug” of Catholicism has never drawn him out of evangelicalism, Mark Galli focuses in on his issues with the Magisterium as a source of authority for the Church. In doing so, he provides a wonderful view of history in which the Spirit is dynamically leading the church into truth gradually and through the passage of time and history:

We mustn’t forget that for a couple of hundred years, most Christians were not Trinitarians in the way we understand the Trinity today, but the Holy Spirit slowly led the church into a fully Trinitarian faith. At one time, Arianism was the majority option in the church, and yet the Holy Spirit led the church to reject that heresy and reaffirm the full divinity of Christ.

This, however, is a strong argument for the validity of the (or at least, a) magisterium. The orthodox teachings of the Trinity and Christ were and are examples of the Church discerning the Spirit, and the Church’s teaching office is in imitation of Christ in His proclamation by His call and in His authority.   Beyond that, contrary to Galli’s claims, there is no reason that an evangelical can’t say, “The Church teaches…” or “The Fathers said…” or “We believe…”

Why does the lack of a magisterium make those things any less true? Why does the presence of a magisterium change them? In fact, Galli seems to have more problems with what the Roman Magisterium teaches then the existence of a magisterium in general. (In some ways and for many people, Galli and other evangelical leaders are themselves a magisterium or a set of competing magisteria.)

-Comment II————————————————–

Here’s another quote, from the conclusion (actually, the second to last paragraph):

The common critique of evangelicalism is that “the center will not hold.” Bah. Humbug. Of course the center will hold, because at the center is not a doctrine, nor some human authority figure, nor a complete and inerrant statement of faith. There is only the Center, Jesus Christ. We don’t need a magisterium.

Galli’s article recalls and renews tensions between evangelicals and Catholics that do not need to exist. It’s disappointing because Galli has been a huge part of helping evangelicals (who, for as long as they have called themselves ‘evangelicals,’ have isolated themselves from the majority of Christians in space and time) to realize that the Christian faith is not our inheritance alone, and not our possession at all.

There is evidence, from very early on, that the article could have gone in the right direction:

We’d love to be able to say, “The church believes X,” and then back it up with a papal encyclical. We want “evangelical” to have clear and firm boundaries, so that when someone says they believe something outside of those boundaries, we can tell them definitively and assuredly that they are no longer evangelicals. We’re tired of arguing, of having to prove our point through the careful examination of Scripture and patient deliberation. Frankly, we’ve given up depending on prayer to change hearts and minds. We want to be able to say, “The church teaches …” or “The Holy Father says …” or “All biblical scholars believe …” in a way that separates the sheep from the goats.

These words are, at their heart, a confession. Being “tired…of having to prove our point through the careful examination of Scripture and patient deliberation” is a failure to love our neighbor and to love God. It would be beautiful if Galli had stayed there.

Here is my hypothesis: Galli fears that true Christianity is getting lost, diluted, led astray. Even if that’s true (and Galli is positioned well to see that it might be), acting from fear is not the right response. Fear leads to (less importantly) the muddied thinking of this article and (more importantly) the regression to un-Christian factional loyalties within the Church.

Galli sets evangelical against Catholic, Spirit against institution, and then Christ against Church, all terribly false dichotomies. The exclusivism that Galli recognizes as wrong in the quote above is the same exclusivism that led him to dash off a book against Rob Bell as well as to write this article.

Most of the people who read this blog know me. Now the others can know about me too.