Literary Re-enchantment in a Secular Age: Recent Episodes
Paul L Fortunato
Our internet-accelerated society has experienced a fraying of our social bonds. We experience a sense of instability and uncertainty. By drawing on wisdom from the religious traditions, embodied in literature and art, we can supplement our impoverished public discourse. Moreover, we maintain a commitment to our multi-cultural reality, putting collaborative pluralism, weaving, at the center. We can fight a culture of constant distraction and build up our capacity to contemplate and think deeply on enduring realities.
We discuss what happened when we moved from an enchanted to a disenchanted world with modernity, what we're calling the "After Virtue" world, after MacIntyre's book. We walk through poems by Wordsworth and Hopkins, paintings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and the film "Enchanted."
We are talking about Liquid Modernity, the hyper-individualist, constantly-distracted, iPhone culture of today. But what about ancient cultures, and how did they transform, first into a virtue-focused culture, and then into an "after virtue", modern culture? I again use Alasdair Macintyre to help us make sense of this situation, and to point to positive new ways of further developing modernity into something more fully human, more full of meaning and purpose.
This is an introductory episode. We cover what Liquid Modernity is, how it afflicts all, whether religious or non-religious, and what Christianity uniquely offers as correctives and powerful resources to thrive in a world that fosters distraction, disconnection, and solipsism.
We go through some ideas from MacIntyre's After Virtue, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, and Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Plus we look at some cool, weird art, to analyze how we got into this liquid modern world, and how we can move ahead with confidence.
What is moral relativism? What is secularism? What are the powerful intellectual arguments for opening a space for Christian thought? Why is now the most promising moment in recent history for Christian intellectual work to transform society? We will work through key Christian intellectuals who provide a wonderful set of tools for building an alternative worldview, one much more satisfying than the liquid modern one. We will start with: Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age Alasdair Macintyre, author of After Virtue.