Marginal Christianity

We end the month with a brief final reflection of paying attention to God. Paying attention to God in the immanent frame of the time we live in requires two things: -intention, and -repetition Intention : paying attention to God won’t just happen because we believe in God. It requires a commitment to live attentively and practices that foster and support that intention. Such intention necessitates a break with or change in our usual patterns of living. Life in the immanent frame will shape us into inattentive and distracted people, people who can’t or won’t see the gorilla in the crowd of people. It’s got to become more than simply a good idea for it to happen. The break with our normal to create space and time for attending to God is essential. Repetition : repetition of the practices that foster attention to God is equally necessary. The haphazard or occasional will not shape a life attentive to God. Only a commitment to be attentive to God will build the...

Charles Taylor ( A Secular Age) , and building on his work, Andrew Root ( Faith Formation in a Secular Age) , detail the rise and significance of the “Age of Authenticity” in their respective works. We live fully immersed in that age so unless we are of sufficient age we cannot remember or imagine the age of conformity, civility, and obedience that preceded it. The Age of Authenticity began in earnest with the Youth and Countercultural movements of the 1960’s (though it had earlier precedents). The central tenet of this age is that the conformity, civility, and expectation of obedience of the previous era was repressive and oppressive in hindering us from realizing our true selves. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the youth culture revolted against the inauthenticity of the previous epoch and set out to “find themselves.” And we’ve been doing it ever since. There are plusses and minuses to this as with every shift of culture. The primary minus is that it centers...

Charles Taylor posits three forms of the Secular in the West. Secular 1: Sacred/Secular Planes Secular 2: Religious versus A-religious Spaces Secular 3: The Negating of Transcendence In Secular 1 the eternal existed with the temporal (the Medieval world). “Above” it, as it were. The transcendent regularly impinged on and intersected the temporal. People lived in expectation of commerce with the transcendent plane (for good or ill). In Secular 2 the zone for the transcendent was reduced to spatial locales (beginning with the Modern era). Transcendence is ruled out though some people still believe and are allowed religious spaces (which jockey to expand those places). In terms of my interest here attention was diverted in other directions than transcendence by the additions of the primacy of reason, the growing interest in history and the fulfilment of human dreams and hopes within history. Attention to God was still tolerated as an idiosyncratic choice some peopl...

Early last year I realized that the issue at the heart of our difficulties in being Christian is attention. Attention to God. I hypothesized that such attention was a matter of intention and repetition. Attention-intention-repetition was the process I began to think on and try to work out the details. And I failed, Through wrong focus and/or inability I came up empty with anything beyond the banal. And then I turned my attention to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age because I believed needed to finish reading it because of its importance. And I was right – just not in the way I expected. Taylor was and is extremely important for me because he helped me recalibrate my focus on the issue of attention I had run into a dead end on. Of course, Taylor’s work is important in a number of other ways too. But it was his contribution to my grasp (or at least a beginning grasp) on the matter of attention that grabbed my interest. Taylor claims that our contemporary “loss” of experience o...

In USA Today columnist Anthony D'Ambrosio reflects on the reasons marriage tends to fail today ( http ://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/07/sex-columnist-5-reasons-marriage-doesnt-work-anymore/25398635/ ). They are: 1) Sex becomes almost non-existent. 2) Finances cripple us. 3) We're more connected than ever before, but completely disconnected at the same time. 4) Our desire for attention outweighs our desire to be loved. 5) Social media just invited a few thousand people into bed with you. This rings true for me. But I'm not interested in marriage here. Rather, I want to reflect on these dynamics in regard to the church. The church has failed as radically as marriage has, perhaps more so. To what degree are these dynamics D'Ambrosio identifies operative in it as well? Sex becomes almost non-existent. Physical expression of love (“love one another”) falls prey to the urgency of other “necessities” and allures of ...