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- Title
NATURALIZING CHRISTIAN ETHICS: A Critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
- Authors
Hart, William David
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
SECULAR Age, A (Book); CHRISTIAN ethics; TRANSCENDENCE of God; HUMANISM; NATURALISM; ALL Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Book); TAYLOR, Charles, 1931-
- Publication
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2012, Vol 40, Issue 1, p149
- ISSN
0384-9694
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-9795.2011.00513.x