RT Article
T1 NATURALIZING CHRISTIAN ETHICS: A Critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
JF Journal of religious ethics
VO 40
IS 1
SP 149
OP 170
A1 Hart, William David
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2012
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/182238768X
AB This essay critically engages the concept of transcendence in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. I explore his definition of transcendence, its role in holding a modernity-inspired nihilism at bay, and how it is crucial to the Christian antihumanist argument that he makes. In the process, I show how the critical power of this analysis depends heavily and paradoxically on the Nietzschean antihumanism that he otherwise rejects. Through an account of what I describe as naturalistic Christianity, I argue that transcendence need not be construed as supernatural, that all of the resources necessary for a meaningful life are immanent in the natural process, which includes the semiotic capacities of Homo sapiens. Finally, I triangulate Taylor's supernatural account of transcendence, naturalistic Christianity, and Dreyfus and Kelly's physis-based account of “going beyond” our normal normality in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics for Meaning in a Secular Age.
K1 Transcendence
K1 Secular
K1 Nihilism
K1 Naturalism
K1 Humanism
K1 God
DO 10.1111/j.1467-9795.2011.00513.x