Meta meta meta
Tonight on Big Brother 12, the implosion of the secular age!
Read the rest of Meta meta meta.John Lardas Modern teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of “Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75:3 (2007), “Deus in Machina Movet: Religion in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 18:1 (2006), and “Walter Benjamin’s 115th Dream,” Epoché 24 (2006). Professor Modern is currently working on a project that explores the relationship between Moby Dick (1851) and the metaphysics of secularism in antebellum America. Read Nathan Schneider's interview with John Lardas Modern here.
Tonight on Big Brother 12, the implosion of the secular age!
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Wars of Religion 2.0
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Let me assure you. Ongoing neurological studies will not dramatically change religious belief or practice. As Robert Bellah notes in a recent comment, brain research does not have a direct effect on what people believe. Or as Christopher White thoughtfully writes in this forum, there is no wholesale transformation of religion on the horizon. I agree with both. But rather than maintain a defensive posture at this juncture in history, I believe that a more aggressive stance may be called for. [...]
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Seen with a genealogical eye, Youth Without Youth speaks to the sheer danger of the sacred as the robust object of mystical longing. But whereas Eliade’s reactionary technophobia limited his appreciation for how the “countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies” were, themselves, constitutive of his experience of the sacred, Youth Without Youth suggests that technology has everything to do with our ability to imagine—whether in the service of embracing or rejecting—the sacred.
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Although technology may not possess a logic of its own, one would be hard pressed to deny its formative role in whatever we are talking about, right now, on this blog. To what degree are the blurry contours and devastating effects of secularism bound up with technology? What role has technology played in fueling the nova effect of secularism and how has it both motivated contemporary practices of naming secularism, of typologizing its seemingly endless permutations, and simultaneously rendered it impossible for such practices to deliver on their promises?
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