Charles Taylor - A Secular Age

Over at What I Saw in America Patrick Deneen has a very interesting post on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This book is sitting on my bookshelf but Taylor is not easy reading and it is over 800 pages so I confess I've been scared of starting it. But I think I'm going to have to.

In response to Taylor Deneen says:

I grow increasingly convinced that our more just society is based not upon a deeper commitment to justice per se, but our increasing liberation from having to care about the fate and condition of other people.

He goes on to point to signs of this in both pop culture (Seinfeld) and in the dissolving social safety net.

The horn of the dilemma for me is suggested in what he says about the old more communal ways of relating:

As Tocqueville predicted, it would be the ascent of individualism itself that would give rise to the felt need for a "tutelary State" to compensate for what had once been provided - albeit unevenly, informally, unequally - within the thicker webs of familial and local life.

The problem is that these goods are provided unevenly and unequally because they are so often informal. So much may be decided by class, race, gender, kinship ties that it is hard not to see the problems with it. George Grant wrote something to that effect in one of his books. The problem with criticizing liberalism, which he did, was that it has brought benefits we don't want to give up. And yet, I agree that we are paying a huge price for this loss of social ties.

Now I'm off to church to live out my communal ties.

Kum ba yah Christians

There is an article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine about BattleCry, a youth crusade that whips kids up into a frenzy and gets them to commit to rejecting anything that the organizer, Ron Luce, doesn't consider Christian. This includes their non-Christian friends. According to the article Luce tells the kids, "The devil hates us and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!" You can read more here. Or you can read the whole article in the latest issue on stands until the 19th. You can read a really good analysis of this movement and why it isn't what Jesus would do at Internet Monk here.

By the way, they sang Kum ba yah at my beloved grandfather's funeral. He spent ten years in the mission field teaching young people. He spent the rest of his life committed to caring for the vulnerable. It was this grandpa who first taught me the grace of forgiveness when I was four years old. I had been playing in the basement and my family were terrified that I had wandered off. Since my grandparents lived on a winding road with poor visibility, a block from the ocean, they had reason to be terrified. As I stood in the midst of some very angry adults it was my grandpa who pulled me up onto his lap and held me.

What kind of face do we want young people to associate with the Gospel?