final Exam Flashcards
Agape
Gods every flowing love and grace
Cant flourish without agape
Age of Authenticity
The search for ways to live one’s life “authentically” in the face of such tension between the impersonal order and the “buffered self” this started out as a concern of a social/intellectual elite and eventually takes a variety of forms, some of which run counter to traditional forms/beliefs of Christianity, others that re-enforce those forms. (Taylor provides examples such as Arnold, Carlyle, the Bloomsbury circle)
Being human is understood as being best achieved through being unique and distinctive, even when these collide with certain social norms. At the same time, there is an increasing awareness of what Charles Taylor (1989) calls “inwardness” or “internal space”. The result is a distinction between one’s private and uniquely individuality, and one’s public self
concepts like sincerity and honor become obsolete
Age of Mobilization
From about 1800 to 1960 where religious forms of the ancien régime-type suffered decay, but new forms that fit the age “recruited and mobilized people on an impressive scale
Anthropocentric shift (4 elements)
now conceiving of Nature as primarily for people
The idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established
The idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone
Autonomy of nature
Correlates with thinking of ourselves as autonomous agents with respect to nature, as well as to whatever higher good or truth that may lie beyond human flourishing.
Axial Age
The higher forms of a religion, the focus from God to the individual.
Embedding of religion in society
Buffered self
We can have an amount of control of how the world impinges on us
Civility
“Civility requires working on yourself, not just leaving things as they are, but making them over. It involves a struggle to reshape ourselves”(101).
Civility included certain aspects such as
ordered government
development of arts and sciences that we would today call technology
development of rational moral self-control
and importantly: taste, manners, refinement – sounds educations and polite manners.
**These aspects were seen as the result of discipline and training
“Closed world structures”
Secular conceptions of the immanent frame that strongly oppose any transcendent explanation and see complete materialism as natural and desirable for modernity
“CWS [argue] it is no longer possible, honestly, rationally, without confusions, or fudging, or mental reservation, to believe in God”
“Code Fetishism” (“nomolatry”)
Manifests itself in the efforts of major thinkers to reduce ethical life to a codified set of moral rules
A morality “defined in terms of obligatory and forbidden actions” and “generated from a single source or principle
Conversion(s)
“A transformation of the frame in which people thought, felt and lived before….changes the meaning of all the elements of the frame. Things make sense in a wholly new way”
Ex: Teresa, St. Francis
Different (spiritual) “speeds”
Concept that the religious orders and the masses were held to different standards of theological rigor
The deeply invested minority saved the majority through prayer and intercession
The disciplinary society
Outgrowth of the general era of the forms that took place during the Enlightenment
Reordering that doesn’t involve strict religious connotations.
It’s for the best of us all
People begin to be interested in nature, in life around them, “for their own sakes” and not just in reference to God (90).
People had to be disciplined because their disorder threatened the elite.(102).
The reform of society was an essential part of statecraft, crucial to the maintenance and increase of state power (102).
Direct Access Society
A new way of convincing political order: Nations, people, can act together outside of any prior political ordering
Exclusive humanism
Disembedding
Gradual removal of various spheres of human activity from any former religious context that they may have been a part of
Disenchantment
-The loss of a sense of magic in the natural world
Disengaged reason
Ideal Secular Age stance for understanding the world, where pure rationality was best able to work towards the order of mutual benefit
Connected to the disciplinary society through the concept that dispassionate impersonality was sufficient to bring about universal beneficence (p.250)
Eclipse of grace
Part of the Anthropocentric Shift, where Grace is no longer essential to aiding human actions. Grace as a gift of God no longer generates a responsibility to act in a certain selfless way towards other people
Instrumental Rationality replaces divinely-aided actions
Economy as “objectified reality”
In the same way people are disembedded from society, economy is separate from the divine society and the moral order.
Separation of power
Page 176
Egalitarian social order
Our ability to flourish is equal
Horizontal
Enchanted world
Pre-secular understanding that divine and other supernatural forces have regular intercession in human lives
Natural phenomena are explained with this context
Excarnation (as opposed to Incarnation)
The steady disembodying of spiritual life, so that it is less and less carried in deeply meaningful bodily forms, and lies more and more ‘in the head’
Exclusive humanism
Believing we can come to conclusions about morality without God
Came from the enlightenment to make nova effect take place
Good beyond human flourishing
Expressivism
Origins: 19th century Romantic appraisal of the self, later becomes a mass phenomenon
Fragilization
A humbling of one’s belief in recognition of the pluralism equally valid transcendent belief options that exist
Unstable position of “spiritual but not religious” that sustains itself mainly through denial of the most obvious extremes of belief and unbelief
Fullness/Human flourishing
“Communion with God”
Good beyond human flourishing
Awareness of this possibility became accessible/understandable thanks to key axial age individuals (Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Confucius…)
Recognizing that there is something we cannot achieve but we striving for it
taking devine out of cosmos, its intangible, we can’t experience it in our body
Realizing the this life is not God’s life our time and God’s time are not the same.
The “immanent frame”
“So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call the immanent frame” (p.542)
The new natural order through which individuals interpret the world.
The “immanent revolt”
deployed by forms of romanticism and expressivism in their stance against the forces of exclusive humanism to indicate the persistence of a spiritual dynamic in human agency that the immanent frame has mostly made invisible (Rossi, 2013)
drawing attention to human vulnerability and fragility as sites of “fissure” in the immanent frame.
The “heart of secularization”
modern decline in the relevance of the transformation perspective
Instrumental reason
Reason used as an instrument which is best for determining the means to an end, achieving moral or social order.
Linear time
Oppose to Secular Time
Chronological
“Minimal religion”
people who declare themselves “just Christians” without denominational affiliation. Their faith is lived within the immediate circle of family and friends rather than in churches.
