By: Kristin Hamilton on January 26, 2018
Last week we were assigned Charles Taylor’s 700+ opus text, A Secular Age, which I quickly realized would take me the better part of a decade to digest. When I saw this week’s text, The Soul of Doubt, by Dominic Erdozain, I looked forward to quickly reading the 266 pages and getting my post written…
By: Stu Cocanougher on January 25, 2018
And if there’s life on other planets Then I’m sure that He must know And He’s been there once already And has died to save their souls (Unidentified Flying Object, Larry Norman, 1971) As a teen, growing up in the 1980s in Nashville, Tennessee, I was fascinated by the music of the Jesus…
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on January 25, 2018
Smith, Taylor and Erdozain For the past few weeks the questions that have been explored are what does it mean to be secular? And what does it look like to live in a secular world? The exploration of secularization as it relates to our understanding of doubt, unbelief and the human condition have been heavily…
By: Lynda Gittens on January 25, 2018
Reading these three books on Secularity can place the thought in one’s conscience to take a bath. How Christians considered themselves clean because they were washed by the blood of Jesus but misused God’s purpose by disregarding those not of the believers’ family as unclean. The Pharisee’s were known for their righteous ways. There…
By: Mary Walker on January 25, 2018
Modernity is a war of religious ideas, not a war on them.[1] In his fascinating book, The Soul of Doubt, Dominic Erdozain demonstrates that it is not science but conscience that has produced our modern culture of religious doubt. “The ‘religious roots’ that I consider fundamental to modern cultures of unbelief are twofold: the positive…
By: Katy Drage Lines on January 24, 2018
Everything has two faces.– Pierre Bayle Some of my favorite people claim no faith, or proudly reject any association with Christianity or the Church. And honestly, who can blame them, these days? For instance, a friend of mine grew up in the church, came out as gay, was rejected by that community and left the faith,…
By: Jennifer Dean-Hill on January 24, 2018
My mother’s words still ring in my ears when describing the rowdy Spring breakers in my hometown of Palm Springs California, who were less than model citizens with their lawlessness and drunken street orgies: “They are very secular.” Even though the word lacked meaning to my young ears, I understood the inference from her derogatory…
By: Jim Sabella on January 23, 2018
I used to collect fossils. When I was pastoring in Pennsylvania I found this huge fossil—about the size of a basketball split in half. It looked like a sponge on one side and like a coiled snake on the other. I had never seen anything like it before. At the time we didn’t have the…
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on January 19, 2018
For the past two weeks, I have pondered on what it means to be secular in America. In America, I have found that it is not a matter of if someone believes in God or has a spiritual belief system but a matter of what exactly they profess to believe in. I live in a…
By: Chip Stapleton on January 19, 2018
Ian, our seven year old, is somewhat obsessed with time. The first thing he does every morning – no matter how early it might be – is come in to our room, grab my cell phone and check the time (and the weather). If we are in the car, or at home there is never…
By: Kristin Hamilton on January 18, 2018
I am a secularized Christian captivated by mystery. My ‘thin spaces’ are found in art, incense, bread and wine, and cement floors dappled with the light through stained glass windows. On the other hand, I feel like there can be no transcendent without exploring they ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of human thought and motivation. The 70s…
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: 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: 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: 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: 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…
By: Katy Drage Lines on January 11, 2018
I begin this post by recognizing it is actually the first of a two part series, reflecting on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Well, really, this first part is more of a reflection on reflections of Taylor’s work, while I envision the second post to focus more on Taylor’s thesis itself. I hesitate to analyze…
