Especially in Christendom, Taylor recalls, there was a unique tension between “self-transcendence” — a “turning of life towards something beyond ordinary human flourishing” — and the this-worldly concerns of human flourishing and creaturely existence. We might redescribe this as a tension between what “eternity” required and what the mundane vagaries of domestic life demanded. It was assumed that human life found its ultimate meaning and telos in a transcendent eternity and that the demands of securing such an ultimate life required a certain ascetic relation to the pleasures and demands of
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