Words on Proclaiming Christian Hope in the Face of Death

Jason Byassee has some tough words about the words of the president of Yale in the face of the murder of a student:

I’m tempted to say Levin’s comments suggest a belief in nothing, but that may not quite be right. We might call this a version of Christian Smith’s “therapeutic moralistic deism”-- the description with which he captures the faith of Millenial evangelicals. Only this is “therapeutic moralistic secularism.” There can be no appeal here to anything specifically religious, though psychological comfort and the language of justice remain on offer. The institution has no word in the face of death beyond “watch out for one another,” “visit the counseling center” and “we’ll catch the guy.” From a Christian vantage point -- one Yale once shared, as most great universities did in this country -- we are empowered by the resurrection to face death with triumphant singing, not with a whimper of acquiescence or tears without comfort.

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Barbarians at the Gates

Over at The Journey Home Paul has some interesting comments about the barbarians in our midst. He concludes:

What, I wonder might be the shape of the struggle to come, for us, between civility and barbarism, and what its monument of record, whichever the outcome?

In Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, Leslie Newbiggin said that we must proclaim the gospel in public conversations in every discipline because in so doing we will be offering hope into a future that will not belong so much to the secularist or pluralists but to the barbarians. According to Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the barbarians are already among us, creating a society which might more accurately be described as hedonistically consumerist rather than secular but is clearly not at ease with itself and is searching for something more. The reduction of the options to the secular alone - whether in law or elsewhere in our public sphere - will not fully satisfy or please.

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This is on the top of my pile of books to read

Re-Enchantment of the World

DANIEL J. MAHONEY

We live in a strange time.

We live in a strange time, in which religious belief seems to be flourishing, church attendance is high, evangelical preachers are household names and traditionalist congregations are more populous than ever. And yet one has only to turn on the television, go to a movie theater, look at a newsstand or read about, say, sex-education courses in the public schools to feel that our society is almost militantly at odds with revealed religion and biblical teaching.

Meanwhile, tracts on atheism ride the best-seller lists — alongside books of soft spiritual uplift from mega-church pastors. What age are we living in, exactly?

A secular one, says Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher and political theorist (and winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize). But his answer is complicated and in no way meant to suggest that religious sentiment is fated to disappear anytime soon. Far from it. A Secular Age tries to explain the modern world to itself in all its contradictions. These include, within a secular culture, the persistence of profound religious conviction and fervent religious observance.

In previous works — such as The Sources of the Self (1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) — Mr. Taylor had described the genesis of a distinctively modern self-consciousness as well as offering a broadly "communitarian" reflection on the strengths and limits of liberal society. A Secular Age is the culmination of Mr. Taylor's intellectual project, a project aimed, ultimately, at defining what it means to be modern.

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