Chapter One
Throughout the history of Christianity the authority of the sacred has never been taken for granted as a compelling moral and spiritual given of unassailable sway. Indeed, the lives of the saints have borne continuing witness to the vulnerability of religious faith, its bouts of frailty in the face of this or that eras challenges. Hence the word secular: the things of a particular time. Such worldliness need not be aggressively ideological, a philosophy that directly takes on a belief in God, a lived commitment to principles and practices upheld in His (or Her or Its)name. The issue, rather, has commonly been regarded (and in letters, essays, books pronounced) as psychological rather than cultural or sociological: the tug, seemingly inevitable, of our senses, our appetites, upon the direction of our energies. God awaits us, as do the various houses of worship that insist upon and celebrate the primacy of the sacred, yet we yield to or seek outright the profane: ide ...
read full excerpt from The Secular Mind ebook
