Holiness In A Secular Age

Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890), a pre-eminent English intellectual and convert to Catholicism, was brought up in a low Church Anglican home where his grandmother and an aunt first nurtured his love for the Bible. At the age of 15, after a short period of entertaining religious doubts, he had a first conversion to Evangelical Christianity. For a few years he was influenced in his piety and biblical reading by evangelical authors, and later in the sacramental and ecclesial life by Anglican theologians. Then in 1845, through the study of the Church Fathers, he came to a profound understanding of authentic development of doctrine, in particular the exercise of the Pope’s office; it was then that he became Roman Catholic. He lived during a period similar to ours: one of economic and technological progress that was accompanied by an embrace of materialism and a subsequent loss of faith and moral breakdown. Newman’s writings challenge us, contemporary men and women, living in a world beset by these similar ills. His writings on the subject of holiness, the practice of the Christian virtues, the objective nature of truth and its relationship to the moral conscience, university education, and the role of the laity in society and the Church are very much needed today. Individuals, parish groups, and students at Newman Centers will benefit and learn from Blessed Newman’s life example, insights, and teachings found in this book.” Beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, his canonization is imminent.

Drawn from the eponymous blog essays on faith, culture, and lives of Christian discipleship by young Jesuit priests and seminarians for young adult seekers.

A masterful teacher looks at "down-to-earth" holiness and inspires us to live for God on the spot where we're standing. To be holy, writes Fr. O'Malley, is to be "fully human, fully alive," and he draws on Jesus' life and the examples of saints who are flawed like us to surprise us and inspire us to be what we already are: children of God in the family of God.

"Solidarity refers to our normative commitment toward some person or set of people as well our psychological motivation to act on that commitment. Liberal democracies need solidarity for at least four reasons: stabilizing society, realizing justice, diminishing dependence, and cultivating moral personality. But they must also navigate a conceptual tension: liberalism valorizes personal freedom, individual dignity, pluralism, and critical reflection; solidarity stresses social unity, visceral attachment, and the subordinating of one's own interest to the good of the whole. Even more dauntingly, they must confront what I call Schmitt's challenge. According to Carl Schmitt, the solidarity liberal democracies need comes from sources they cannot themselves produce, like religion. Thus in an age of declining religiosity and rising nationalism, how can we form strong social bonds without racism, demagoguery, and xenophobia? Can we have not only solidarity, but liberal solidarity, in a secular age?"--

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

If God is holy, then He can’t sin. If God can’t sin, then He can’t sin against you. If He can’t sin against you, shouldn’t that make Him the most trustworthy being there is? Bestselling author Jackie Hill Perry, in her much anticipated follow-up to Gay Girl, Good God, helps us find the reason we don’t trust God— we misunderstand His holiness. In Holier Than Thou, Jackie walks us through Scripture, shaking the dust off of “holy” as we’ve come to know it and revealing it for what it really is: good news. In these pages, we will see that God is not like us. He is different. He is holy. And that’s exactly what makes Him trustworthy. As it turns out, God being “holier than thou” is actually the best news in the world, and it’s the key to trusting Him.