So Taylor summarizes the point: “A way of putting our present condition [our ‘secular age’] is to say that many people are happy living for goals which are purely immanent; they live in a way that takes no account of the transcendent” (p. 143). So what made that possible? How did we get here? Well, it turns out that this was made possible by theological shifts associated with movements of Reform. Once we learned to distinguish transcendent from immanent, “it eventually became possible to see the immediate surroundings of our lives as existing on this ‘natural’ plane, however much we might
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