HQ

"This is the end" Jerry Falwell This is my first experience of an American culture war. And it's a heated one.  In a war like this the voice of the cultural critic is an important one and, for the Christian, a calling, a calling to talk frankly about sin and doom. And after the recent murders perhaps we should listen. Such a task is not novel or a side effect of early twentieth century fundamentalism. Calling out a culture on its sin has been the job of Christians since the church began. Apart from the Bible, which has a lot to say about sin,  The Didache, written in the first century, had this to say about its hostile culture: "it is evil and full of cursing, murders, adulteries, evil desires, fornications, thefts, idolatries, magical practices, sorceries, robberies, false witnessing, hypocrisies, double-mindedness, guile, pride, malice, arrogance, covetousness, filfthy talk, envy, insolence, haugtiness, boastfulness... [They] persecute good people, h...

Secularism is marked by the fragility of belief in transcendence. Its central impulse is the naturalization of all things, the leveling out of reality into a single plane. How secularism arose is a tricky question, but Charles Taylor attempts to explain how we got here. To do so he describes four parallel worlds. He admits they are ideal worlds and, in reality, relate to one another in significant ways. But to describe them well, he suggests, they must be described separately.