In this episode we look at the idea of goodness and how humanity has shifted its understanding of why we pursue it.

How did humanity come to accept goodness in the same movement as distancing themselves from God? How did agape love descend to a form of measured universal sympathy? Is this is natural progression of humanity once the structures of religion are removed? We explore these and other questions, and seek to address the issue of how to be a missionary in this space in today's world.

"They could find within their own human resources the motivation to universal beneficence and justice" (p248).

"The disengaged, disciplined agent, capable of remaking the self, who has discovered and thus released in himself the awesome power of control, is obviously one of the crucial supports of modern exclusive humanism" (p 257).

"Like all striking human achievement, there is something in it which resists reduction to these enabling conditions" (p258).

"The core of the subtraction story consists in this, that we only needed to get these perverse and illusory condemnations off our back, and the value of ordinary human desire shines out, in its true nature, as it has always been" (p253).

References:

-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (242-259)

Website:

-https://sites.google.com/contemplatingculture

In this episode we look at the development of the Modern Moral Order as expressed in "polite society", the power of this communally held notion, and the impact of this upon religion and people of faith. Polite society has bequeathed us tolerance, but is this really what we're called to?

References:

-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (234-242)

Website:

https://sites.google.com/contemplatingculture

In this episode we look at the 3 forces Charles Taylor proposes as fuelling the rise of deism:

-the success of the order project, the mentality that "we can do it on our own"

-continuation of the ideals of the reformation, the decline of the mysterious and heroic as the ordinary vocations are affirmed

-reaction against the 'juridicial-penal' model, where self-interest came to be accepted as good in a rejection of the "depraved humanity" of Jansenism

We discuss what was it may have been like for the individual and their life of faith living in this period of transition, as well as the response of theologians through theodicy (giving an account for God). Taylor sums up this response when he says "Now that we think we see how it all works... [people begin discussing divine justice] and the theologians begin to feel that this is the challenge they must meet to fight back the coming wave of unbelief" (p. 233).

References:

-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (226-234)

Website:

https://sites.google.com/contemplatingculture