The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3): Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

Secular 3 is the loss of the reach of transcendence itself. To live in a secular 3 world is to inherit a sense that it’s much easier not to believe in a God who reaches out to us. Secular 3 is an absence of belief—the nearly unthought conception—that God no longer reaches out to us.

Rosa shows that the more we become fertile in technological gadgets and identity options, the more we find ourselves in a time drought, or what he calls a “time-famine.”

In late modernity we’re not willing or able to name (beyond for our individual selves) the virtues, the values, or the character traits that make for a good life. We may have some ideas, but describing the substance seems to risk violating the ethic of authenticity. Our moral stance—our sense of what is good and what creates a good life—is authenti

The pace of life increases because an accelerated modernity asks us to speed up to do more actions inside our units of time. And this becomes a high good.

to have a sense of the present, especially at the social level, there must be coherence between experience and expectations.

Bonhoeffer asserts that something is fundamentally lost when the congregation evades a conception of persons. To see this again through Rosa, personhood is often obscured in the acceleration of modernity,27 where the present is compressed, the future and its newness are our aim, resources are our obsession, and dynamic stabilization is our hope.

Silicon Valley shifted greed from pure dollars and cents to time itself.

there is a direct quality, beyond spin, that the technological acceleration and its innovations give to our daily lives. It’s reach.

We’ve already discussed how depression is the speed sickness (Zeitkrankheit) of identity innovation and how busyness becomes a sense of fullness that produces a deep sense of guilt. Continually increasing speed (through the logic of innovation) produces alienation.