{"id":11850,"date":"2017-02-19T17:07:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T01:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=11850"},"modified":"2017-02-19T17:07:02","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T01:07:02","slug":"it-used-to-be-98","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/it-used-to-be-98\/","title":{"rendered":"It Used To Be 98%"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> In the 1930s, 98% of Jamaica (my birth country) subscribed to a Christian culture because most of those people were descendants of slaves. However, in that same era, the Rastafarian movement arose as this new group started to worship Haile Selassie (born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael), the emperor of Ethiopia. The Rastafarians worshiped him as the incarnate god because, in their minds, Selassie represented the messianic figure who would bring peace and prosperity. While Christians believed in the invisible or unknowable God, the superstitious group felt that it made sense to believe in the visible or knowable god. What was amazing is that Rastafarianism rejects Christianity because of the rigidity but chose to follow a more rigorous belief.<\/p>\n

Over the last few weeks, my doctoral class has been reading books that challenge Christian intellect, and there\u2019s no doubt this week\u2019s readings also reveal agnosticism. In How (Not) To Be Secular<\/em>, the goal was to provide a \u201cconcise commentary, identifying the thread and logic of Taylor\u2019s\u201d book, A Secular Age<\/em> (Taylor, 116, Kindle). Let\u2019s create an analysis of this commentary:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u201cOn the one hand, this is a book about a book \u2013 a small field guide to a much larger scholarly tome\u201d (Taylor, 75, Kindle).<\/li>\n
  2. \u201cOn the other hand, this is also meant to be a kind of how-to manual \u2013 guidance on (how) not to live in a secular age\u201d (Taylor, 75, Kindle).<\/li>\n
  3. \u201cThis is a philosophical handbook intended for practitioners. To translate and unpack the implications of Taylor\u2019s scholarly argument for practice \u2013 especially ministry\u201d (97, Kindle).<\/li>\n
  4. \u201cThe core of this book emerged from one of the highlights of my teaching career: a 2011 senior seminar devoted to close (and complete!) reading of Taylor\u2019s Secular Age<\/em>\u201d (126, Kindle).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In Benedict Anderson\u2019s book, Imagined Communities<\/em>, he stated that \u201cCommunities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity\/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined\u201d (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6). The question we have to ask ourselves is, did our forefathers imagine the society in which we live or did this happen by accident? The opening paragraph of this blog tells how many Jamaicans were locked into one belief system (Christianity) until the emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1930s challenged the belief in an invisible God. Hence, we could argue that the Jamaican society became secular because \u201cA society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable and contested\u201d (Taylor, 22). Smith calls this, \u201csocial imaginaries\u201d to suggest that new belief systems supplanted the traditional worldviews.<\/p>\n

    \"\"In Smith\u2019s writing, the reader is challenged to not only be grounded in faith but consider whether or not our convictions are believable. I grew in an era where miracles were the reasons for the subscription in Christianity but living in the United States, witnessing organic miracles (blind eyes opening, mute speaking, etc.) are almost extinct. I\u2019m still not sure if I should be embarrassed for the lack of faith or the reality that I did not have the intellect to explain (and even worse, defend) my belief. The microwave society where technology and science make Christianity less believable, has put a strain in how ministry leaders engage communities. As a result, the idea of disenchantment becomes evident in Taylor\u2019s account as he suggested that \u201cSignificance no longer inheres in things, rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally\u201d (Taylor, p. 29). Smith believes however that the modern \u201cbuffered self\u201d creates its own meaning through things such as science and technology, which causes us to be \u201caware of the possibility of disengagement\u201d (Smith, p. 31).<\/p>\n

    In Smith\u2019s book, Desiring The Kingdom<\/em>, he asked: \u201cWhat sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?\u201d (Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p. 1486). The reality is that we are never fully aware of how we will behave with cultural influences, although we know how we should or want to behave. Our desire becomes governed by these social imaginaries, even with misguided tendencies. Taylor suggests that people in the West eventually leave old ways behind and subtract things from our vision. This is the idea of \u201cstories of subtraction, \u201d but Smith looks at it from the position of us evolving out of religious faith because of \u201cscientific exorcism of superstition.\u201d There are many complexities in our secular age, and according to Taylor, we can\u2019t undo the secular. However, we have a responsibility to ensure we don\u2019t transfer the reverence we have to God and offer it to humanism. Both books provide a challenge in that we\u2019re challenged to analyze how we behave and caution how we may behave in the evolution process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In the 1930s, 98% of Jamaica (my birth country) subscribed to a Christian culture because most of those people were descendants of slaves. However, in that same era, the Rastafarian movement arose as this new group started to worship Haile Selassie (born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael), the emperor of Ethiopia. The Rastafarians worshiped him as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[537,1],"tags":[835,774,833],"class_list":["post-11850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography-drama-thriller","category-uncategorized","tag-charles-taylor","tag-dminglp6","tag-james-k-a-smith","cohort-lgp6"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}