MacIntyre famously petitioned for another St. Benedict to found communities of virtue capable of withstanding secular erosion. Taylor intends to demonstrate the impossibility of the Benedict Option by showing the impossibility of being other than secular.
Taylor made his name with Hegel, a major book reintroducing its subject to English-language scholars in 1975. His debts to Hegel are apparent in his notion that the history of Western thought is sedimented into our experience of the present. The past remains active because our historical consciousness is shaped by the concepts and thought-forms inherited from earlier modes of human experience.
This conviction about how the past informs contemporary life guides the method and content of A Secular Age. It involves Taylor in a careful description of the contents of our experience. He wants to bring into focus the “background conditions” that frame our knowledge but usually escape notice. Most of us think we are aware of what most matters to us and that we formulate those concerns into explicit beliefs. Taylor maintains that this overlooks the hidden judgments, motives, and feelings that size up our world before we conceptualize it. These, he believes, have shifted.
The mark of a secular society is that believers can no longer enjoy a “simple” or “naïve” faith. The “conditions of belief” have changed such that Western Christians are now unable to believe without reservations, without uneasily looking over their shoulders. The honest believer must concede, “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection—by some experience which won’t fit.” In sum: Secularism means that our Christian experience is now shaped by a lurking uncertainty.
MacIntyre combated the prejudice, uncritically affirmed by Taylor, that secular modernity is a historical dispensation from which there is no intellectual escape. He called his work a “radical renovation” of classical traditions of thought. Its most important consequence has been a growing confidence that the work of human reason can be undertaken in a context broader than that of modernity.
We would do well to listen to Taylor, but apprentice ourselves to MacIntyre.
Tayloring Christianity | Matthew Rose
My question is whether anyone here has read either of these authors and what do you think?
Or even if you haven't, what do you think?
Taylor made his name with Hegel, a major book reintroducing its subject to English-language scholars in 1975. His debts to Hegel are apparent in his notion that the history of Western thought is sedimented into our experience of the present. The past remains active because our historical consciousness is shaped by the concepts and thought-forms inherited from earlier modes of human experience.
This conviction about how the past informs contemporary life guides the method and content of A Secular Age. It involves Taylor in a careful description of the contents of our experience. He wants to bring into focus the “background conditions” that frame our knowledge but usually escape notice. Most of us think we are aware of what most matters to us and that we formulate those concerns into explicit beliefs. Taylor maintains that this overlooks the hidden judgments, motives, and feelings that size up our world before we conceptualize it. These, he believes, have shifted.
The mark of a secular society is that believers can no longer enjoy a “simple” or “naïve” faith. The “conditions of belief” have changed such that Western Christians are now unable to believe without reservations, without uneasily looking over their shoulders. The honest believer must concede, “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection—by some experience which won’t fit.” In sum: Secularism means that our Christian experience is now shaped by a lurking uncertainty.
MacIntyre combated the prejudice, uncritically affirmed by Taylor, that secular modernity is a historical dispensation from which there is no intellectual escape. He called his work a “radical renovation” of classical traditions of thought. Its most important consequence has been a growing confidence that the work of human reason can be undertaken in a context broader than that of modernity.
We would do well to listen to Taylor, but apprentice ourselves to MacIntyre.
Tayloring Christianity | Matthew Rose
My question is whether anyone here has read either of these authors and what do you think?
Or even if you haven't, what do you think?
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