From the end of a New Yorker tidbit about the Catholic scandals: “Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher.”
A friend writes to say: A trifle 9/10 in tone, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times‘ website, Stanley Fish—reliable as the bellwether of hipster intellectuals—writes about the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ turn to post-secularity: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
Not that there’s any connection.
April 19th, 2010 | 4:00 pm
Channeling Philip Rieff, though, “the essential contents of their religious traditions” will be given the ironic, “we don’t actually believe this stuff” wink, in the hope that it is possible to preserve the ordering social/cultural function of religion with any of that embarrassing belief nonsense.
April 20th, 2010 | 7:25 am
Ah, the inimitable Hendrik Hertzberg. He often writes the lead-off piece for “The Talk of the Town,” and I can almost always recognize his work before turning the page and seeing the byline.
April 20th, 2010 | 8:09 am
People of good will look for a human institution which best incorporates and lives all that we can understand as good and true. But this is the wrong quest. Rather, where is the Church in which, in spite of mankind’s “sins, absurdities, and tragic failures” Christ is living and present to us as true food and drink for our souls? Where can we encounter the living Christ! For several generations, many of those who teach within the Church have failed to understand and communicate this truth, even removing the living Presence from our church buildings in a misguided attempt to place ourselves and our human faith in the center. The consequences are all around us.
April 20th, 2010 | 9:07 am
Re: the New Yorker piece – The Hertzbergs of the world are not, of course, interested in “teaching” those transgressors in the mainline Protestant churches, or synagogues (unless they’re Orthodox, of course), or … public schools.
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