In media res

Questioning Peter Rollins' grand story

2012-01-24T12:17:00.001-05:00

I've got a new post up over at Patrol:

In reading various reviews and reflections on Robert Bellah’s latest tome, Religion and Human Evolution, I was reminded of some thoughts I had written down about Peter Rollins’ work. I have tried to cobble something coherent together here which conveys my general criticism, which is basically historical in nature. One reflection on Bellah at the SSRC blog entitled “The Return of the Grand Narrative” echoes a work Quentin Skinner edited many years ago called The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. This collection attempted to provide a map for the major schools which had recently arisen in the human sciences, such as the Frankfurt School and deconstruction. I thought it might be useful to consider Rollins in light of this map (also useful for a reading of Bellah).

Read the rest here.

Beyond biblicism

2011-11-01T15:00:00.001-04:00

My latest book review via Patrol:

In The Bible Made Impossible Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith makes an impassioned argument for a move beyond evangelical biblicism and theological liberalism. Biblicism is a package of beliefs and practices about the Bible which emphasize its “exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.” The main thrust of Smith’s book is directed towards this package and the fact that evangelical adherence to biblicism has done nothing to prevent or even address what he calls pervasive interpretive pluralism. In other words, biblicists may share their biblicism with one another, but they ignore the fact that they radically disagree about an enormously wide range of beliefs and practices central to the Christian religion.

Read the rest here.

Faith in public

2011-09-12T12:45:00.000-04:00

An excerpt from my latest book review over at Patrol:

"Should religion be monitored in our politics through a separation between the public and private sphere? Is such a division even possible? Do liberal constitutional democracies depend on this division? In A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Shape the Common Good Miroslav Volf addresses these and related questions, challenging the idea that religion should retreat or be restricted to the private sphere, diagnosing where religion malfunctions when it does, and outlining what an engaged public faith might look like for and from a Christian perspective."

Read the rest here.

Review of J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion volume 5

2011-09-09T11:30:00.000-04:00

H-Net has posted a review of J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion: volume 5, Religion: The First Triumph, on their H-Net Review section, for anyone interested.

And for anyone keen to see Pocock in action, and on a subject intimately related to this volume, see this lecture video delivered last year at Sussex University's Centre for Intellectual History, "Anglican Enlightenment and Christian Revelation".

Online history

2011-09-06T05:30:00.000-04:00

A recent Facebook link generated the idea of creating a list of great internet resources related to or for historians. The link in question was for a website dedicated to early modern English history, particularly the history of medicine: The Casebooks Project.

Personally, I've enjoyed some of the resources made availbe through the celebration of various historical births, deaths, or publications. This includes a great site hosted by Cambridge for John Milton's Paradise Lost called Darkness Visible.

As with most things that live online, I've used Delicious to track websites I've found interesting or helpful using the tags "history", "resources" and "online". You can RSS any one of those tags, if you want to follow along. And feel free to post any others in the comments.

A/theism: shared entanglements

2011-08-22T09:15:00.002-04:00

In a recent post at Patrol I've suggested that diversity is a present-day anxiety shared by both atheists and theists, and that both groups feel the strain of addressing this challenge. This is hardly a novel point. But as Clifford Geertz observed some years ago in his essay "The uses of diversity", if diversity used to be envisioned across a landscape, it has now to be conceived more as a collage - internal as much as external to our cultures. A recent dust-up amongst the atheist community on the subject of misogyny seems to lend a bit more credibility to my claim, at least as analyzed on the A/theologies blog, that debates derived from and about diversity spill over the boundaries separating religion from atheism (and agnoticism).

On Charles Taylor

2011-08-16T13:30:00.006-04:00

Source: NYRB.

Readers looking for a wider view of Charles Taylor's work than the somewhat ambivalent, narrow portrait given by James Wood in "Secularism and its discontents" can now take a look at Mark Oppenheimer's engaging attempt to concisely summarize Taylor's oeuvre in five points. While it's obviously an oversimplification, it's certainly an inviting one.

Thinking historically about Christian Nationalism

2011-08-12T08:15:00.009-04:00

I've got a new blog post book review up at Patrol:

In his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? John Fea explores the history of Christian nationalism, the relationship between Christianity and the American Revolution, and the beliefs of several of America’s founders. The most interesting and original part of the book shows that there have always been significant figures in American history, often on opposing side of the political spectrum, who have said that America was founded as a Christian nation. Fea also provides a conventional account of the American Revolution which highlights the defence of that political action within arguments that he says did not depend on “traditional Christianity”. And he summarizes the beliefs of several prominent American founders like Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and John Witherspoon, who held a range of differing views on the relationship between church and state.

Read the rest here.

Wither Evangelicalism?

2011-07-29T13:30:00.014-04:00

My latest post at Patrol is a review of David Fitch's latest book on evangelicalism. Here's an excerpt:

While it would be a mistake to draw a straight line between seventeenth-century English Protestantism and today’s Anglo-American evangelicalism, one Reformation trait they continue to share is an abiding concern to connect belief and practice in a way that remains true what early moderns called “Primitive Christianity”. This reforming impulse, as mutated as it has been by the intervening years, continues to animate an evangelicalism that in America is showing signs of increasing strain, perhaps even decline. David Fitch’s The End of Evangelicalism?, one of the most recent forays into the territory of evangelical navel-gazing, fits squarely within this longstanding Protestant tradition. In short, Fitch asks if there is a way evangelicals can recover the “core” of their beliefs and practices, discovering a “new faithfulness” for the twenty-first century.

Read the rest here.

Religious and atheist diversity

2011-06-07T12:30:00.004-04:00

My latest post at Patrol is up, where I call for a patient and sustained engagement with both religious and atheist diversity.

Religion is sometimes held to be untrue today because there are so many different and often conflicting claims made about it. To even speak of “religion” in such reified and monolithic terms offends contemporary ears. In an address to the 2009 American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal, then president Mark Juergensmeyer pointed out that after 100 years of studying religion scholars were still not agreed as to what, if anything, the term “religion” meant. While scholars may not agree as to its meaning, it seems to be the case that religious diversity exerts a kind of negative pressure on those who study and practice a given religion today, as a fact which such a religion must face as mark against it. Religious diversity, in other words, is very often felt to count as an automatic blow to any and all religion whatsoever. But this wasn’t always the case.

Read the rest here.

"Visions of history"

2011-05-18T09:30:00.002-04:00

I've written a short essay for an online, open-source humanities journal called Expositions, under the section "Notes & Insights" entitled "Visions of history: Simon Schama, Mark Noll, and Paul Ricoeur". In the essay I use Simon Schama's recent column in the Guardian about teaching history in school in the UK as a point of departure for a short reflection on the practice, writing, and reception of critical history both for citizens of liberal democracies and for members of the Christian community.

Charles Taylor on CBC Ideas

2011-04-16T08:45:00.001-04:00

Some readers of this blog might be interested in a lengthy interview with Charles Taylor on CBC Ideas where Taylor discusses at length his life and work. I found episode 3 particularly interesting, where Taylor discusses his candidacy for the NDP against Pierre Trudeau.

The podcasts are available to be streamed or downloaded here: CBC.ca | Ideas | The Malaise of Modernity, Part 1 - 5

Our Ethical puzzles

2011-03-21T11:27:00.000-04:00

My latest post is up over at Patrol, a review of Charles Taylor's latest collection of essays and work in general. Here's a snippet:

When faced with a difficulty or a problem we often attempt to take stock of our situation in order to come to a solution. But taking stock can itself be a complicated process, and there are many ways to disagree about how this ought to be done – just what are the relevant factors? And it isn’t difficult to endow this kind of reflection with an ancient, prestigious lineage: even Aristotle admitted that “all questions are hard to decide with precision” (Nicomachean Ethics IX.2). This rather simple way of characterizing philosophical puzzlement is, I think, an appropriate description of what Charles Taylor has been doing for the duration of his philosophical career; he has repeatedly attempted to make the stakes in any given debate clearer so that a more robust philosophical argument can be made about them – not unlike Aristotle himself. This way of grappling with contemporary problems is on offer once again in his aptly named collection of essays,Dilemmas and Connections (2011).

Continue reading the rest here.

History of the Present journal

2011-03-09T09:00:00.002-05:00

A new journal is being launched called History of the Present: a journal of critical history in 2011. Here's what the editors say about its aims:

to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians.

It looks to be another good scholarly contribution to the practice of history and reflection upon that practice. They were even savvy enough to create a Facebook page.

IHR: Mark Bevir and Quentin Skinner

2011-03-08T08:30:00.004-05:00

For anyone interested in the philosophy of history as applied to intellectual history in particular the names of Mark Bevir and Quentin Skinner will be familiar. Volume 21, Issue 1 of the Intellectual History Review is a themed issue on Bevir's work, The Logic of the History of Ideas, sometimes including a discussion of Skinner as well. And the issue concludes with a response from Bevir himself.

Immoral atheism?

2011-03-03T17:30:00.001-05:00

My latest post is up over at Patrol, on one of the bad arguments Christians continue to make about atheism.

It is disappointing to see a Christian fulfill what I would have thought was a tired stereotype: asserting that a rival belief or argument is ultimately based on immorality. Aside from being a conversation-stopper, in today’s world it seems to exude the bunker mentality of a subculture that does not want to sincerely engage with the world around it. Jim Spiegel has written a short article in Christianity Today that implies “New Atheists” are atheists because they cannot overcome their irrational passions. He even goes so far as to suggest that unbelief might be best fought by traditional family values, a conclusion derived from another scholar who claims that many prominent atheists in history had what amount to father issues.

Read the rest here.

Review: The Fringes of Belief by Sarah Ellenzweig

2011-02-16T08:45:00.008-05:00

I just noticed that my latest book review - of Sarah Ellenzweig's The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking 1660-1760 - is now available online. Read it here: Histoire sociael/Social History, 43, 86, Nov 2010. And be sure to check out the book too.

History Journal Response Times wiki

2011-02-02T15:00:00.001-05:00

A few others have noted this resource around the web, but I thought I would pass it along for anyone interested. It's a wiki page that reports the wait times experienced by those submitting work to academic historical journals. It should be of some help to those looking to make decisions about where to publish there work, especially if they're a graduate student like me, and would like to have something published before they're on the job market.

History Journal Response Times - Scratchpad Wiki Labs - Free wikis from Wikia

Pocock on Pincus

2011-02-01T13:05:00.004-05:00

J. G. A. Pocock reviews Steven Pincus' book 1688: The First Modern Revolution in Common Knowledge (behind subscription wall). Pincus presented a highly condensed version of this book's argument in the History Seminar at Johns Hopkins University about two years ago, where it generated much discussion. This review, in Pocock's characteristic style, and the book itself, of course, are certainly worth a read for those interested. I also found Bernard Bailyn's review in the NYRB useful, particularly for the background information about the book's inception.

Representing the "Nones"

2011-01-18T09:00:00.001-05:00

My post about American political culture and atheism is up at Patrol. I suggest that, given our political and social ideals, believers need to be actively making room for the representation of the religiously unaffiliated in our institutions.

2010 Lafontaine Baldwin lectures

2011-01-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

This year's Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture was delivered by His Highness the Aga Kahn, spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Muslims. CBC radio recently posted the lecture as a podcast. The lecture series in general is an excellent read for interested Canadians, a selection of which can be found in two books: The Lafontaine-Baldwin Lectures and Dialogue on Democracy. For more on the Aga Kahn's view of religious pluralism, you might want to take a look at a collection of his speeches, Where Hope Takes Root, which I had a small hand in helping to put together a few years ago when I worked at the Aga Kahn Foundation Canada.

Cliopatria awards 2010

2011-01-08T15:31:00.001-05:00

For those interested the 2010 Cliopatria awards, over at the History News Network, were posted yesterday. They are dedicated to celebrating excellence in history blogging, with several different categories.

2011

2011-01-05T17:02:00.001-05:00

In 2011 I hope to write more consistently at this blog on a set of themes related to both my personal and my research interests: history and historiography, political philosophy, religion and science, art and art criticism. These themes reflect my own preoccupations, particularly as I continue to meditate on what I want to say about a specific subject in early modern English history, i.e. the focus of my dissertation. But the same questions that confront a dissertation can be widely applied to other areas. A dissertation on early modern atheism clearly resonates with many of the debates about religion, science and atheism today, for instance. But the broader significance of this history, and the practice of shaping an argument that ultimately takes the form of a story, can also address more universal concerns: how do we represent the past? what follows from the fact that our arguments are embedded in stories, be they religious or scientific? and so on.

I have come to find that if I cannot explain why I think a movie is good or bad in a convincing or clear way, for example, then I owe it to myself to think more about art and about arguments. How would I defend one of my favourite photographs, a self-portrait by Stanley Kubrick, to my family and friends, to a classroom full of students, and to a group of professional critics? In writing about specific problems and topics, I hope to give some good answers and to capture something about the world and our experience of it.

Brian MacLaren interview

2010-11-24T12:27:00.001-05:00

Over at Patrol I interview prolific and popular author Brian Maclaren.

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists. He is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs. He has appeared on many broadcasts including Larry King Live, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and Nightline. His work has also been covered in Time (where he was listed as one of American’s 25 most influential evangelicals), Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, and many other print media.

Read the interview here.

Barbarism and Religion: Volume 5

2010-11-23T10:48:00.000-05:00

The next volume in J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion series is due out in January, 2011.

Barbarism and Religion: Volume 5, Religion: The First Triumph by J. G. A. Pocock

Is the past a mirror?

2010-11-20T09:55:00.012-05:00

In a recent post at Big Questions Online entitled A Not-So-Distant Mirror, Alan Jacobs suggests that the 18th-century might be a mirror to our own by drawing on the work of Roy Porter. This is, actually, quite a contentious claim. Some of the more important debates about English/British history in the last 50 years - indeed, history-writing generally - have been about whether or not we should understand the early modern period as a kind of road leading to modernity. Porter certainly leans that way - his book on the Enlightenment was titled The Creation of the Modern World - while other notable historians, such as Linda Colley, would likely express serious reservations about any such linear analogy. Indeed I suspect Porter himself, in his more tentative, reflective moments would hesitate as well. In his review of Porter's work on the British Enlightenment, "Highway to Modernity", Colin Kidd specifically identifies these contrasting movements - liberal whig progressivism and scholarly reticence - in Porter's own thinking. And then we have the important work of Jonathan Clark as a contrasting voice.

The sin of anachronism in historical method is a mortal one because it rearranges the ideas and values of the past in ways which make past actions inexplicable except as attempted anticipations of the present. The historian is always condemned to see the past through a glass, darkly; the introduction of anachronistic categories turns that glass into a mirror. (J. C. D. Clark, English Society, p. 13)

Quite obviously the nature of the relationship between the past and present is highly debatable. Jacobs seems to suggest here that there is something particularly important about seeing a moment in the past as a mirror, perhaps that we can somehow learn a specific set of lessons because of this similarity. By contrast, many historians today would insist on seeing the past as a "foreign country", as David Lowenthal has put it. Indeed, Bernard Williams suggests that what marks the possibility of history, at least in terms of the history of philosophy, is preserving a sense of "strangeness" about the past ("Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy", The Sense of the Past).

At least one potentially worrying aspect about seeing in the past a mirror, without addressing the important points Clark raises, is an inability to be critical about certain of its features. But we can move in the other direction as well. If the past is in fact foreign to the point of complete strangeness, to become wholly other, there seems to be, by definition, no way in which we could actually recognize or understand it at all. It seems to me that a substantial part of the challenge of critical history understood as an activity that generates representations of the past, that constructs discursive mediations of something that once was but is no longer (i.e. "the past"), lies somewhere between these two poles.

Pop Atheism vs. Academic Atheism

2010-11-19T08:58:00.001-05:00

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, an interesting first salvo on "pop atheism" from Jacques Berlinerbrau.

Pop Atheism vs. Academic Atheism - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Quote:

To read these scholars is to learn that countless assumptions of Pop Atheism are incorrect. I list some of these erroneous assumptions here:
1) That the term “atheist” has a clear, agreed-upon meaning
2) That there are consistent, recognizable markers of atheist identity
3) That self-described “atheists” share common assumptions about what atheism is
4) That “atheism” and “secularism” are synonyms
5) That being an atheist necessitates a relentless hostility to all forms of theism
6) That atheism and theism are radically distinct, sharing little in common epistemologically, historically and even “theologically,” if you will.
Every one of these assumptions, I repeat, is either problematic or just plain wrong.

J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion

2010-11-07T10:30:00.000-05:00

For those interested, there is a public half-day conference on J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion series - the latest of which is scheduled to be released sometime in early 2011 - at the City University of New York on November 19, 2010.

See: The Center for the Humanities | Conferences in the Humanities for more details.

The Legacy of Hans Castorp

2010-11-05T08:30:00.002-04:00

My short piece on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain at The Curator:

A question confronts the reader at the end of the novel: has Hans Castorp wasted his life? The Magic Mountain is in a way a long preface, a long story leading up to a climactic moment. So much so that the novel opens by making reference to the past of legend, beyond all memory, as that period before which the Great War broke out. But The Magic Mountain is also a story punctuated by many climatic moments — most of which explore some of the novel’s central themes, like the “Walpurgis Night” (Chapter 5) or the “Snow” (Chapter 6) episodes. As Paul Ricouer has observed (see Time and Narrative, II, pp. 112-30), Mann has provided us with the fictional material to reflect upon the imaginative variations of time and narrative, life and death, nature and culture. The novel itself wonders aloud at the experience of time and its narration, leading the reader to think of the novel’s temporal demarcations as musical “movements” rather than the interrupted staccato of abrupt chapters. Depending on how one tells the story, how one arranges time and plot, our life can be cast as tragedy or comedy or something else entirely. And we can see this readily in the life of Hans Castorp: considered as a whole his life might fit either of these genres — or in not really being whole at all, in being cut off, his life might simply be an incomplete part.

Read the rest here.

Religion as a catalyst of rationalization?

2010-11-04T14:21:00.002-04:00

The Immanent Frame has a post up on religion and rationalization related to my Patrol post on Habermas, religion and philosophy.

In contrast to metaphysical thinking, with its overvaluation of philosophy’s power, and thus its belief that philosophy is itself the voice of the truth of being, postmetaphysical thinking would neither dismiss religion as mere myth, and thus as the other of reason, nor assimilate itself to religion, usurping religious language and contents (as with mystical philosophies, such as that of the later Heidegger, with his call for a God who would save us). In other words, metaphysical thinking either surrendered philosophy to religion or sought to eliminate religion altogether. In contrast, postmetaphysical thinking recognizes that philosophy can neither replace nor dismissively reject religion, for religion continues to articulate a language whose syntax and content elude philosophy, but from which philosophy continues to derive insights into the universal dimensions of human existence.

James K.A. Smith on Philosophy, Culture and Communication

2010-10-30T09:37:00.001-04:00

My interview with James K. A. Smith is live at Patrol Magazine.

James K. A. Smith is currently Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI where he also teaches in the Department of Congregational and Ministry Studies. He also serves as Executive Director of the Society of Christian Philosophers. His book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation was awarded The 2010 Word Guild Award in Leadership/Theoretical, as well the Christianity Today2010 Book Award in Theology/Ethics. His new book, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition, was just published by Brazos.

Conversation and commitment

2010-08-07T10:00:00.001-04:00

My post on Habermas' latest book, religion and the public sphere is up at Patrol Magazine.

One of the most important living philosophers has turned his attention to the relationship between faith and reason. In doing so, Jürgen Habermas has continued to fulfil his exemplary role as a public intellectual committed to the practice of reasonable communication as a model for politics. Given what some have called the “return of religion” to the public sphere, Habermas’ contribution is sure to be widely-discussed. It also deserves a wide hearing among North American Christians.

Read the rest here.

A Secular Age: Nineteenth-century Trajectories

2010-07-24T10:00:00.001-04:00

This post is part of a series that summarizes and examines different sections of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

In chapter 11, “Nineteenth-Century Trajectories”, Taylor traces the conflicted directions of the conditions of belief in the Victorian era. This is best represented for him by the experiences of Mathew Arnold, who felt a profound sense of lack in the absence of the divine, as a cursory reading of Dover Beach makes clear. The modern moral order was pushing the divine out, and there was a perceived need to replace it with something else. Arnold’s response, as Taylor sees it, was to appeal to “culture”, which meant literature and education. Likewise, the philosopher T. H. Green appealed to “religion” and “culture” in the face of a growing sense of anarchy. Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s popular novel Robert Elsmere portrayed this shift in a narrative of conversion and reconversion, which represents for Taylor one Victorian response to the dry rationalism of J. S. Mill or modern biblical criticism.

As Taylor makes clear, there were many such cross-pressures. Obviously the emergence of evolution added another dimension to a set of developments already at work within the "modern moral order". Was the solution an impersonal God fit to match an increasingly impersonal nature? Some, like August Comte, pursued this in a “religion of humanity”. But, as Taylor notes, this religion had a relatively short shelf life. It was a compromise solution to the multiple pressures of Victorian life.

But Comte’s “religion of humanity” was symptomatic, Taylor argues. The Victorian Christianity of self-discipline, underpinned by the humanism of duty, will and altruism was part and parcel of a wider common history. Whereas Christian benevolence had traditionally been understood as a product of grace, humanist benevolence was a “higher” moral self-assertion. Where Christianity offered reward for altruism in the hereafter, humanism made benevolence its own reward. Where humanist benevolence had the potential to be truly universal, Christian benevolence could be tempted to exclusion.

Yet even the Victorian humanist emphasis on discipline, will, and character-formation could be criticized. Taylor focuses on the late 19th-century reaction to the materialism and moralism of Victorian culture in favour of “higher” activities such as politics, war, and art. Many figures held onto Protestantism and notions of Western civilization based on law, democracy and decency, those like G. E. Moore, Taylor suggests, opened up new spaces of unbelief that by drawing upon post-Romantic aesthetics as an ethical category.

Much of this newfound moral and political confidence was shattered by the experiences of the Great War. The range of reactions to that experience – extreme politics, international liberalism, the further undermining of Christianity – were accompanied by a shift from a vertical to horizontal society. What had begun as an elite, minority phenomenon, now became an experience of a wider section of society. Combined, this series of trajectories composed a complex challenge to the ideals of the modern moral order from which belief and unbelief began to be uncoupled.

Faith after religion

2010-07-09T10:00:00.001-04:00

My post on Richard Kearney's latest book, Anatheism, is up at Patrol Magazine.

There are moments in this information age where you can feel as if you are drowning in words. This is not to give in too quickly to the argument that suggests we are somehow becoming dumber or incapacitated in the presence of more information. Rather, in a world that is being transformed by access to information, it can be hard to appreciate the power of words, to appreciate what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur referred to as the “efficacity of speech.” Moreover, that very abundance can also make listening to the Christian message more difficult for those of us intent on doing so. There are, it seems, an endless array of voices clamouring for our attention.

Read the rest here.

A Secular Age: Providential Deism

2010-05-15T17:30:00.006-04:00

This post is part of a series that summarizes and examines different sections of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

The turning point begins with the shift to “Providential Deism”, which Taylor argues has four components: (1) God’s providence becomes located in human flourishing alone (Tindal, Le Clerc, Bernard, Saint-Pierre); (2) the eclipse of grace, replaced by reason and discipline (Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson); (3) the sense of mystery fades (Toland); and (4) the eclipse of the idea that God plans the transformation of human beings. Taylor here rejects the idea that the rise of natural science can alone account for these developments.

The new forms of religiosity emergent in this period reflect these shifts, including what Taylor calls Protestant and Catholic hyper-Augustinianism (Calvinism, Jansenism). These religiosities fit better with the “buffered self” and the providence of the “modern moral order”. They also operate in tandem with neo-Stoicism and the disciplinarian drive which Taylor sees characteristic in Locke, Mandeville and Smith. Their view of civil society as a “harmony of interests” is reflected by a similar harmony found, according to Taylor, in the period’s apologetics.

How do we explain this? For Taylor it was partly the successful drive of reform, imposing order and discipline on both society and self; the carrying forward religious reform; and partly a reaction against the judicial-penal framework that had become an exclusive horizon within medieval and reformed Christianity, a reaction which bolstered deism and exclusive humanism alike.

With this fourfold eclipse, Taylor argues, the notion that God had purposes for human beings beyond fulfilling his plan in the world begins to fade, and worship shrinks to carrying out God’s goals (which are really our goals) in the world. While contemplation of God’s goodness could remain inspiring, as in Hutcheson, the source of inspiration was increasingly found within man and nature themselves.

These developments have cultural correlates in the rise of a “polite and commercial people”: productive, useful, but also aesthetic (literature, conversation, philosophy). This culture, Taylor argues, prided itself on certain goals and certain actions, approached others as mutual agents for mutual exchange (economic or enrichment), and adopted a historical narrative whereby self-understanding is identified with progress towards polite culture (Hume, Gibbon). Thus, for Taylor, the moral order of polite civilization is easily lived as a self-sufficient framework which only requires God to support rather than impinge upon it.

Five responses to the "new atheism" reviewed

2010-05-06T09:43:00.001-04:00

My review of five Christian responses to the "new atheism" is up at Patrol Magazine.

THERE ARE a lot of good reasons to read a response to the so-called “new atheists.” When I was young my mother saw that I was an overly inquisitive child who had a seemingly infinite set of questions about current affairs and religion. I remember with fondness when, in 1987, I got my first edition of the Guinness Book of World Records—so many facts to explore and things to learn! I also remember some of the books that sat next to my consecutive Guinness Books, written by Christians responding to the perceived threats of modern life in the 1990s: Lee Strobel, Philip E. Johnson, Ravi Zacharias, and Josh McDowell. Ironically, it was Zacharias’ book, Can Man Live Without God?, that actually raised, rather than settled, so many lasting and perplexing questions.

Read the rest here.

A Secular Age: The Rise of the Disciplinary Society

2010-04-01T18:00:00.007-04:00

This post is part of a series that summarizes and examines different sections of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

In Chapter 2, "The Rise of the Disciplinary Society", Charles Taylor attempts to weave a contrasting set of intellectual and social moves in late medieval and early modern society into a narrative of secularization that does not simply tell what he has called a "subtraction story". His aim in sections 3 and 4 is to outline how the instrumental view of human reason became dominant in Europe, whereby "a stance of poiesis" enters into "the domain of praxis" (p. 113). This is a set of moves is accompanied by what he calls a science of instrumental efficacy articulated by men like Cusanus, Ficino, and da Vinci.

The instrumental view of nature characterizes God primarily by his unlimited sovereignty, in contrast to the ancient characterizations of the cosmos as the realization of the Form (as in Plato). Nominalist writers like Descartes and Mersenne understand nature as a great mechanism because their God possess an all powerful will that can subject the universe to total manipulation. Efficient causality replaces teleology.

But Taylor wisely wishes to avoid placing all the causal force on a shift in ideas. He also spends a considerable amount of time on Justus Lipsius and the rise of Christian neo-Stoicism. This combines his earlier discussion of the "drive for order" and reform through a new understanding of man and his nature. Lipsius’ man of constancy, who stands above the disorder of the passions, when combined with the new religious drives for reform - including both voluntary and state institutions - represents an important social and cultural shift in Europe at this time: the goals of being totally rid of violence and social disorder, and to bring civility to everyone.

But where did the energy for reform come from? Taylor argues that for the Calvinists it came from a belief in providence attached to their programmes, and for the neo-Stoics a newfound belief in natural order. These two complementary beliefs receive an important column of support from the emergence of early modern natural law: "what emerges out of this reflection on Natural Law is the norm of a stable order of industrious men in the settled courses of their callings, dedicating themselves to growth and prosperity, rather than war and plunder, and accepting a morality of mutual respect and an ethic of self-improvement." (p. 129)

It was no accident that the move towards an ethic of poiesis, whereby virtue was understood as the dominance of the will over passion, was charted by Descartes, schooled by neo-Stoics at La Fleche. For Descartes the passions were to be brought under the instrumental control of reason, a reason fully detached from the proposed outcome of deliberation. Taylor argues that Descartes' key term was generosity: where once it had meant to live with a sense of one's rank and the honour attached to it, Descartes internalized its meaning so that generosity meant living up to a non-socially defined rational agent. What moves us now is not a place in tune with nature but an intrinsic sense of self worth.

And so at the end of section 4 the buffered self has been added to the disengaged rational agent: the one removes fears of spirits, the other now operates on the fears of desire. So equipped, early modern man should now be able to stand back from desire and rationally determine how he should order himself. This, according to Taylor, was Descartes' goal.

A Secular Age: The Bulwarks of Belief

2010-01-15T15:00:00.004-05:00

This post is part of a series that summarizes and examines different sections of the book.

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is a sustained criticism of negative secularization theories. As we saw in the introduction that Frank's post provided, Taylor is primarily concerned to narrate the transformation of the "conditions of belief" from premodern to modern societies. He does so in order to reveal how the background to lived experiences (and the aspiration to flourishing, fullness) proves crucial to understanding the shift from naive belief to an awareness of many belief options.

Chapter 1, "The Bulwarks of Belief", begins with differences between what Taylor calls an "enchanted" and "disenchanted" world, borrowing from Max Weber and Marcel Gauchet. But this shift is only one part of the story, which Taylor discusses under the headings "obstacle", "equilibrium" and "a common understanding done away with".

(I) The enchanted world is a world filled with what Taylor calls "porous" selves. A porous, premodern self places the locus of meaning and action in the world "outside" him or herself, "exogenously". The enchanted word was spiritual, where things themselves had meaning, where meaning could be extra-human and intra-cosmic. This contrasts with the modern, disenchanted world where meaning is fundamentally construed as "within" ("endogenously"), and specifically within the human mind. This buffered self sets up a series of boundaries not present in premodern selves: between agents and forces, mind and world, physical and moral. Where the natural world, the existence of society and the enchanted cosmos affirmed the existence of God, it was very hard to embrace unbelief. If someone denied God they did not thereby leave the "field of forces" that remained, many of which were malevolent, making unbelief difficult to entertain.

(II) Porous selves were thus vulnerable selves. They were also part of communities that felt themselves to be part of a spiritual and force-filled world. That is why, Taylor argues, there was such enormous pressure to conform, such intolerance for heretics, and so little unbelief.

(III) Porous selves were also part of a society that held two goals in tension: that of self-transcendence associated with the ideals of Christianity, and that of normal human flourishing. Taylor uses Turner's concept of play between structure and anti-structure, as embodied in medieval Carnival, for example, to demonstrate how this equilibrium was held in balance. It was both functional, in "letting off steam", and affirmational, in confirming the normal order of society.

Subtraction stories do not pay enough attention to these changing conditions of belief and are therefore unable to explain the transition from naive belief to an awareness of belief options. Taylor supplements this criticism with a narration of such changes, from the enchanted to the disenchanted world, from the porous to the buffered self, and from the world of play between structure and anti-structure to its restriction in contemporary life.

On a methodological level Taylor's main argument is that the conditions of belief and background need to be front and centre in any account of secularization. Of course in such a complex and extended argument what this looks like will be up for sustained debate. And even if one accepts Taylor's methodology, we are left with a series of thumbnails that cover very complex subjects - what happens when one of these is the focus of historical and philosophical criticism? While it would be foolish to think consensus is ever likely to emerge on either point, the difficult work of evaluating Taylor's contribution begins here.

Book review - Diverse Enlightenments?

2008-05-05T19:00:00.001-04:00

My book review of:

Carey, Daniel —Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 276.

Robertson, John —The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2007. Pp. 476.

Project MUSE - Histoire sociale/Social history - Diverse Enlightenments?