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A Secular Age: an exercise in breach-mending

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kieran Flanagan*
Affiliation:
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 4, Priory Road, Bristol BS8 ITY

Abstract

This article considers three aspects of Taylor's A Secular Age: the issue of the status and authority of theological insights derived from sociological analyses; the irresolvable ambiguities of secularity, where it marks the disappearance of religion but inadvertently affirms its persistence; and the properties of nostalgia and memory that unexpectedly shape post-secularity and the forms of enchantment it seeks.

Type
Symposium on Charles Taylor with his responses
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2010 The Dominican Society.

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References

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26 See the excellent essay by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Kevin J. Christiano, ‘Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept’, in The Secularization Debate, op.cit., p. 13 for the reference to Berger.

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43 Ibid., p. 152.

44 Flory, Richard and Miller, Donald E., Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, see chapter 5, ‘Reclaimers’. It should be said that these questings under this category were using Episcopalian and Greek Orthodox Churches to reclaim lost traditions. Their reasons for reclaiming these bear similarities to the attractions Taylor finds in late medieval Catholicism.

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48 See for example, Schwehn, Mark R., Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Given the highly secularised ethos of the English university, these American concerns have only lately and exceptionally been discussed. See Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). See also the report on a new programme to affirm the value of religion in the face of secular criticism that is being organised by the Faith and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths College, London, The Church Times, 29th January 2010.

49 His term relates to the notion of blindsight (a capacity to see but not to name) that seems to characterise secularised forms of visual culture. This forms a central concern of Sociology in Theology, op.cit.

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