This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

The dynamic of secular faith thus accounts for the possibility of ongoing commitments—whether to individual aspirations, love relations, or collective endeavors. These are secular forms of faith because they are devoted to projects that are bound by time.

This pain of bliss will recur in all the moments of happiness in My Struggle. The more attached he is to what he sees, the more vulnerable he is to bereavement. But this agony is also part of what enlivens and deepens his experience. If he could not lose his proximity to Anne Lisbet, he would have no sense of the miracle of being close to her. Ther

My point, however, is that if you care for our form of life as an end in itself, you are acting on the basis of secular faith, even if you claim to be religious. Religious faith can entail obedience to moral norms, but it cannot recognize that the ultimate purpose of what we do—the ultimate reason it matters how we treat one another and the Earth—i

For Kierkegaard, this is the deepest virtue of religious faith. As long as you keep religious faith, you cannot be defeated by loss. If you lose your religious faith, then everything is lost, but as long as you keep it you are safe. Abraham is the supreme example, since he keeps faith in God’s promise regardless of what happens in the world.

For example, a husband who is making the movement of infinite resignation should be able to stay with his wife and children, apparently as devoted as ever to them, even though at every moment he is renouncing his care for them and is ready to give them up.

When we wish that the lives of those whom we love will last, we do not wish for them to be eternal but for their lives to continue. Likewise,

The exploitation of workers is necessary under capitalism, since only the extraction of surplus value can generate any form of social wealth. Even if we developed our technologies to the point where we could provide the necessary means for everyone to lead their lives—with only a small amount of social labor required to operate the technologies—we

The first principle of democratic socialism is that we measure our wealth—both individual and collective—in terms of socially available free time. Our free time depends on social and institutional forms because it does not concern a mere quantity of time. Rather, our quantity of free time is inseparable from the quality of our free time, which requ

to have secular faith is to acknowledge that we are essentially dependent on—and answerable to—other persons who cannot be mastered or controlled, since we are all free, finite beings.