How (Not) To Be Secular: Responding To A New Millennium - James K.A. Smith
Вставка
- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- James Smith, professor at Calvin College, makes a case against rising secularism, emphasizing the continued presence of spirituality, and he asserts that a secularist explanation of humanity cannot account for spiritually motivated behaviors. This lecture was sponsored by The Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University and delivered on March 10, 2016.
James KA Smith is slowly becoming a favorite. He can balance clarity with profundity, something intellectuals are awful at.
“Cross Pressures”..... get it?
I am an atheist, but don't really care about defending or arguing that point. I don't toil over all this god-talk or connect to the words "eternity" or whatever. I don't like the word "worship" and so reject "modes of worship".
What I am interested in living a simpler life and get along better with the people who live very close to me. Mostly when I want to go to some church, it is as a quick impulse and no church is open unless it is Sunday morning, so I end up at a bar (or public house). I usually have a great time but find myself in a place which runs by selling beer, which I don't really care much about. I want places near where I live and work to simply go and form community.
I am with you at times, but this feels like the tour always ends at a Christian bookstore. You project far too much of your own religion onto the life outside your system. I very much get the feeling that no one in the room really talks TO people like me, but rather is happy with simply wondering about a straw-man of me.
My internal landscape is very much colored by my use of the epic novel 'Finnegans Wake' as a sort of lifesong as I ponder the work of Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, and others. I don't want a Christian thing to be revealed to me from this. At times, as I have been accosted with an unending attempt to linguistically return me to my heavenly father, I have gone into a sort of meditative and tranquil place simply to remain present and not begin thinking about list of stuff that I have to do in life, completely uninvested in the conversation/conversion. So much Christian time seems spend preparing for a dialectic battle which I simply reject. Isn't this what I am supposed to do? What if I am actually past it all now, as I claim? It is ironic that meditation should be necessary in order to not fall in the very apologetics/anti-apologetics binary thinking that you seem to claim to want to get away from. This doesn't happen at a church/bar. I don't have the longing, I don't defer the way that you seem to. To live life in the present transcends some need for meaning. My interest in Taylor is in building better local community. I just want to sing some song, get energized, connect, and maybe have some food and socialize. It is all more primal. If I pick a church-home in my area, I will eventually be led to the exclusion of all other churches. I know, because I have visited them all and they all end as inwardly directed groups, very unaware of the true feeling of those just outside their building (even the equally isolated church right next to them). To break out of the in-group biases and connect deeply with people is my transcendent desire.
John Rigler, not all churches are equivalent in an analogous sense to the fact that you aren't equivalent to folks with different "lifesongs"
How exactly does one convince a group to commit to those practices without a core implicit bias? Bonhoeffer (whom you might enjoy) pointed out the folly of this decades ago. Eventually, when you make the group 'about' the group, you will ultimately be disappointed in the group, because those people you are connecting with, are deeply messed up people. No amount of optimism can erase that truth.
You reject “modes of worship”...
That’s pretty funny. You see how silly that is, right?
Beautiful comment. I find much resonance with your thoughts. I would like to add just the simple experience of mine that there are indeed communities who seek to include and understand the perspective of others, in that primal way. I have found a few in my life, and they are worth searching for.
How much of ancient belief is he hoping to recapture. If you read the Bible, you'll find all kinds of beliefs that modern folks couldn't possibly recapture. I suspect things will get worse as time goes by from the viewpoint of those who are religious believers and are hoping for a recovery of a world of believers. Accelerating science and technology are pushing us away faster and faster from those old strange Biblical beliefs. Another generation or two and they will be incomprehensible.
People have been saying that for centuries now. And yet, there's more Christians on the earth right now than ever before. A people group/civilization can't function without a religion for very long, even if everyone rejects Christianity, something will replace it. The future belongs to those who show up for it, secular atheists don't have children. Speaking in a global context, you're a dying breed, and a uniquely western phenomenon. People in other parts of the world aren't going to abandon their religious upbringing like a bunch of 21st century Swedish Lutherans, most parts of the world just don't work like that.
i am surprised smith's glib arrogance in dismissing the spirituality of oprah and of elizabeth gilbert as not being salvific...but perhaps it's because they're women..given he doesn't even know the actual name of the woman who wrote frankenstein!