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

what is odd is that as authenticity becomes our focus and we are asked to deeply attend to our own experience over obligation, we, according to Taylor, begin to feel cross-pressure: as we are encouraged to embrace our own experience and honor it as truth, many of us begin to feel “caught between an echo of transcendence”22 and the cold walls of the

transcendent. But this door is no longer culturally open, and walking into it is no longer culturally assumed. This door has not been subtracted or removed but rather has been blocked by a pile of additions (like scientific positivism, materialism, expressive individualism, and more).

We can all get to the same speed thanks to the impersonal, the disenchanted, and the private—by all living in a solely material world. But these equalizing forces make it much harder for people to perceive divine action in both their lives and the world, framing our shared downshifted lives in immanence.

We struggle with MTD because we have not realized that we’ve lost the essential nutrients of the believability of transcendence.