After last semester, I'm over secularism, but the rest of the world just seems to be getting started. I got to moderate one of the panels at a big conference on secularism which started today, and the hall was packed. The papers were all over the place, and more interesting than I expected. Religious voices are not part of this conference, but three of my four speakers (actually one of them is religious, I think) argued for a kind of openness to something important beyond the worldview of secularism: in a tragic ambiguity in experience only ritual lets us accept (Adam Seligman), in a politically radical spirituality which is and should remain undefinable (Peter Van Der Veer), and in a pluralism of immanent understandings which embrace time as becoming without resentment (William Connolly). The fourth would have nothing of it: his argument (it was Daniel Dennett) was that "We are made of trillions of mindless robots," and the rest is memes. What any of this had to do with the panel theme, "Religious selves, secular selves," I really don't know, but we had a good time. Hasn't changed my mind on secularism as a poorly formed question, though.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Secularism, secularism everywhere
After last semester, I'm over secularism, but the rest of the world just seems to be getting started. I got to moderate one of the panels at a big conference on secularism which started today, and the hall was packed. The papers were all over the place, and more interesting than I expected. Religious voices are not part of this conference, but three of my four speakers (actually one of them is religious, I think) argued for a kind of openness to something important beyond the worldview of secularism: in a tragic ambiguity in experience only ritual lets us accept (Adam Seligman), in a politically radical spirituality which is and should remain undefinable (Peter Van Der Veer), and in a pluralism of immanent understandings which embrace time as becoming without resentment (William Connolly). The fourth would have nothing of it: his argument (it was Daniel Dennett) was that "We are made of trillions of mindless robots," and the rest is memes. What any of this had to do with the panel theme, "Religious selves, secular selves," I really don't know, but we had a good time. Hasn't changed my mind on secularism as a poorly formed question, though.
