How (Not) to Be Secular Quotes

“Excarnation The process by which religion (and Christianity in particular) is dis-embodied and de-ritualized, turned into a “belief system.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Subtraction stories Accounts that explain “the secular” as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Instead, Taylor is concerned with the “conditions of belief” — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture — the “stronger form of magic” found in the ever-new glow of consumer products”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured the person is not scientific evidence per se, but the form of science: “Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form” (p. 362). Indeed, “the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (p. 365).”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Not surprisingly, where Barnes really appreciates the haunting of immanence is in the realm of the aesthetic.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more — some “fullness” that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we’ve constructed in modernity.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“what does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this raises the question of how to reach exclusive humanists. On the other hand, the question bounces back on the church: To what extent do we “believe” like exclusive humanists?”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates” (p. 695). How do we manage to do it? Or how could we? “Well, one way is that performance of these standards has become part of what we understand as a decent, civilized human life” (p. 696). The mechanism then becomes shame: to not meet these expectations is not only to be abnormal but almost inhuman. One can see this at work in a heightened version of holier-than-Thou: You don’t recycle (gasp)? You use plastic shopping bags (horror)? You don’t drive a Prius (eek!)? “You won’t wear the ribbon?!”44 This has to also be seen in light of Taylor’s earlier analysis of the sociality of mutual display and the self-consciousness it generates (pp. 481-82). So what we get is justice chic.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly “fundamentalist” will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the “emerging church” or “progressive” evangelicalism, we’ll be set on a path to something like Protestant liberalism, a new deism; or b. recognize the disenchantment and excarnation of evangelical Protestantism, and also reject the Christianized subtraction stories of liberal Christianity, and feel the pull of more incarnational spiritualities, and thus move toward more “Catholic” expressions of faith — and these expressions of faith will actually exert more pull on those who have doubts about their “closed” take on the immanent frame.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Mas agora na Era da Autenticidade, com sua perspectiva de individualismo expressivo, temos uma mudança qualititativa: "A vida ou prática religiosa, da qual me torno parte, deve ser não só da minha escolha, mas também deve falar a mim, deve fazer sentido em termos do meu desenvolvimento espiritual como eu o concebo". O expressionista forja sua própria religião ("espiritualidade"), seu próprio Jesus pessoal. Isso começa a afrouxar as coisas de modo geral, de acordo com o individualismo expressionista, de maneira que se torna cada vez menos "racional" aceitar quaisquer restrições externas. Assim, ao passo que metodistas e pietistas dão vazão a uma ênfase nos encontros emocionais com Deus, embora se mantenham atrelados à ortodoxia, é apenas uma questão de tempo antes que "a ênfase se volte mais e mais na direção da força e da genuidade dos sentimentos do que para a natureza do seu objeto". E assim surge uma nova exigência espiritual: "deixem cada pessoa seguir seu próprio caminho de inspiração espiritual. Não se deixem desviar dele pela alegração de que não se coaduna com alguma ortodoxia".”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“recognize “a fundamental ambivalence of human reality” (p. 673). So once again, both exclusive humanism and Christianity are hooked on the same horns. That shouldn’t be cause for premature rejoicing for Christians (p. 674), since that would just be Schadenfreude — we don’t have a “solution” either (p. 675). Instead, it raises the apologetic question: “who can respond most profoundly and convincingly to what are ultimately commonly felt dilemmas?” (p. 675). The secular3 age is a level playing field. We’re all trying to make sense of where we are, even why we are, and it’s not easy for any of us. Taylor insists that, while he believes a Christian “take” can account for”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“It is this sort of contested, cross-pressured, haunted world that is “secular” — not a world sanitized of faith and transcendence, flattened to the empirical.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“God is dead, but he’s replaced by everybody else. Everything is permitted, but everybody is watching.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Even a late modern hero like Steve Jobs doesn’t conform to the narrative of secularism. In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson recalls a scene near the end of Jobs’s life that exemplifies the ambiguity of our secular age: One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Taylor is not only interested in understanding how “the secular” emerged; he is also an acute observer of how we’re all secular now. The secular touches everything. It not only makes unbelief possible; it also changes belief—it impinges upon Christianity (and all religious communities). So Taylor’s account also diagnoses the roots and extent of Christianity’s assimilation—and hints at how we might cultivate resistance.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-’60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values that were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic; p. 484). What erodes in the last half century is precisely these limits on individual fulfillment (p. 485). The Place of the Sacred in Our Secular Age What is the “imagined place of the sacred” in a society governed by expressivist individualism (p. 486)? Taylor has already hinted that such a society seems to forge its own “festive” rendition of the sacred — “moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrench us out of the everyday, and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond ourselves.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?” (p. 355). Nevertheless, we can’t quite shake our feeling that “there must be an object.” And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art “trades on resonances of the cosmic in us” (p. 356). And conveniently, art is never going to ask of you anything you wouldn’t want to do. So we get significance without any ascetic moral burden. But”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.11”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“We have already seen how modernity does away with “higher” times, leaving us to the merely chronological tick-tock of “secular” time. However, our own experience suggests that the unstoppable homogeneity of time is unbearable and unsustainable for us as humans.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“There is a specter haunting our secular age, “the spectre of meaninglessness” (p. 717) — which is, in a sense, a dispatch from fullness. And because this won’t go away, but rather keeps pressing and pulling, it generates “unease” (p. 711) and “restlessness” (p. 726).”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“In other words, codes are inadequate as moral sources precisely because they do not touch on the dynamics of moral motivation.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“The secular3 age is a level playing field. We’re all trying to make sense of where we are, even why we are, and it’s not easy for any of us.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“hoping to find a language for death. In his hands, the language of death is democratic — which makes good sense since death is quite impartial (talk about e pluribus unum!).”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“And I’m looking through the glass Where the light bends at the cracks And I’m screaming at the top of my lungs Pretending the echoes belong to someone — Someone I used to know.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“It’s not “meaning,” and it’s certainly not meaning in general, he says. “Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific good or value. One might die for God, or the Revolution, or the classless society, but not for meaning”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor