Chapter 2 - Living in a Secular Age

Summary

Chapter 2 is a reflection on how people in Western societies seem to struggle to understand the ongoing place of religion, which means that they also and perhaps particularly struggle with the idea of a divine revelation and the possibility that there is anything more than the immanence of the world. The average person growing up today – whether or not he or she is religious in some way – inhabits the world as a secular reality. That person might have links to a religious community, might have a sense of openness to the transcendent and might name that transcendence 'God' in ways that are shaped by the tradition of that community. Any commitment to transcendence will be challenged, however, not only in the face of the encounter with multiple other beliefs and worldviews, and not only because something like Charles Taylor's 'immanent frame' overwhelms the social imaginary, but also in the face of the radical interruption and forgetting of traditional symbolic networks on which particular religious systems and their communities depend. The injunction to remember that is at the heart of the three Abrahamic religious traditions simply no longer comes to mind in the once-Christian West.