By: Jennifer Dean-Hill on January 18, 2018
To some, secularity could be described as an absence of God, or a space in which God is not believed in or readily sought after. Another definition of secularity describes it as an evolution where God was once exclusively acknowledged and worshiped, but then adapted to a choice for individuals to question God’s role, identity,…
By: Mark Petersen on January 18, 2018
As I embarked upon my reading of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I felt uncomfortably trapped at a formal dinner party sitting next to the most erudite, obnoxious man. He was unfortunately trying to impress me with his name-dropping, and relished quoting obscure literary texts in their original languages. It was only as I compelled myself…
By: Jean Ollis on January 18, 2018
I found it! An online resource to help explain Benedict Anderson’s comprehensive text on nationalism. But I hesitate to click and hit enter. The website, titled “The Nationalism Project”, sparked my interest but also gave me a sense of dread. What if this site was pro nationalism to an extreme of white supremacy? I precipitously…
By: Stu Cocanougher on January 18, 2018
Last week I spent several days with church planters in San Francisco, California. At the same time, I was reading Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s landmark work, A Secular Age1. I found this to be a serendipitous experience. A Secular Age is an award-winning, exhaustive (896 pages) work which gives a fresh perspective on the secularization…
By: Katy Drage Lines on January 18, 2018
Throughout history we’ve seen the dichotomy of the younger generation resisting or rejecting the ways of the previous generation, both within families and society as a whole. There’s always some pushback as well as some “younger” folks who gravitate and affirm the ways of the elders. In a sense, we are in the midst of…
By: Lynda Gittens on January 18, 2018
The church is different but not all is lost. Historical Church – London Modern Church- USA The church architect has changed over the years, and so have people’s views about God. Charles Taylor shares his revelation of how God is viewed in this secular age (West).…
By: Jason Turbeville on January 18, 2018
The problem I am working on is a simple one at first glance, why do church congregations tend to be inwardly focused instead of focusing on others? When I started reading Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson the first thing I thought of is “are churches imagined communities?”. I wondered what was an imagined community and how…
By: Dave Watermulder on January 18, 2018
“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.”[1] In his classic polemical-historical book, “Imagined Communities”, Benedict Anderson goes deep and wide to explain and explore the rise of “nationalism” as a new “imagined community.” The line often cited to sum up his work is…
By: Jennifer Williamson on January 18, 2018
“Imagined Communities represents one of the cornerstones of modernist thought in nationalism studies.”[1] Anderson proposed the idea that nations and nationalism are modern constructs whose establishment was rooted in the tandem development of print capitalism and the use of vernacular language, which enabled groups of people to create a shared identity. This shared identity—which exists…
By: Greg on January 18, 2018
I went for a walk today and began to look at the community that I live in. This country and its people are made up of hundreds of different that are bound together in a unified way. Benedict Anderson in his book, Imagined Communities, calls all nations imagined. “It is imagined because the members of…
By: Jake Dean-Hill on January 17, 2018
Benedict Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, was very difficult for me to understand or comprehend. In fact, I think I might have spent more time looking for resources to help in this process than I did reading the book. Thanks to Trisha, this quote helped set the stage…
By: Jay Forseth on January 17, 2018
[1] Talk about visual ethnography! This picture tells a powerful narrative of Nelson Mandela shaking the hand of World Cup rugby champion and Springbok captain Francois Pienaar. How in the world did Madiba forsee this opportunity to unite his racially divided country? It was simply brilliant to capitalize on a newly forged South African NATIONALISM through…
By: Dan Kreiss on January 17, 2018
Race, faith, friends, housing development, city, state etc. represent what most of us consider to be community of one description or another. None of those require much imagination as everyone belongs to a multiplicity of these types of community. Yet, Benedict Anderson’s use of the term ‘Imagined Communities’ suggests something more. Deeper? Maybe. Confusing? Somewhat.…
By: Jim Sabella on January 17, 2018
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” [1] The now famous quote by Julian Barns was considered “soppy” by his philosopher brother and has become a type of mantra for the secular age in which we live. No other person has approached secularism in such depth as did Charles Tayor in his…
By: Mary Walker on January 17, 2018
My dear brother, I finished a book this week that made me reminisce about our growing up years. The book is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor and it is long and wieldy, over 800 pages. I mostly skimmed this richly layered book but carefully and thoughtfully read the pages that address the historical…
By: Kyle Chalko on January 12, 2018
Bebbington in his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain lays out a clear history of the rise, spread, and splintering of evangelicalism in Britain. While I have studied a decent amount of church history, most of my evangelical church history that I’ve studied has been more focused on the USA. How ethnocentric of me. Bebbington shows,…
By: Chip Stapleton on January 12, 2018
Usually, as I start planning out a blog post, my biggest hurtle is narrowing my focus enough so that my engagement with the topic is thorough, but not dissertation length. That struggle seemed to be multiplied exponentially this week as I found myself marking a paragraph almost every page of How (not) to be Secular:…
By: Trisha Welstad on January 11, 2018
Who really wants to be named as an Evangelical today? The term comes with so much baggage from centuries of history and is a challenge to define in mainstream culture, as it often tends to categorize a very specific demographic having little to do with the origins of the movement at all. The word ‘Evangelical’…
By: Greg on January 11, 2018
We were a couple of hours from deciding if there was possible way for us to stay in China. When we met on monday night, I was exhausted, worried and frustrated with government officers and the individuals who enjoy holding the answers and the power. Our family visas expired the next day (Tuesday) and that…
By: Kristin Hamilton on January 11, 2018
“There’s no undoing the shift in plausibility structures that characterize our age. There’s no undoing the secular; there’s just the task of learning how (not) to live – and perhaps even believe – in a secular age.” – James K.A. Smith (11) “The REAL problem with Millennials is that they have to live with the…
