Sublime

the heavy and slow marks of a moral tradition with a substance that demands the slowness of forging character, practicing virtue, and forming values.

in a post-Durkheimian age religion would be completely severed from people’s conceived history, fading into one’s individualized and completely buffered sense of the self as a completely self-chosen identity.

What puts the local congregation in a crisis, I believe, is not necessarily that congregations are losing pace to dynamic stabilization (which is often how consultants and denominational officials frame it). Rather, the deeper issue is not only that people lack the time and energy for community, practice, and substantive moral traditions but that t

The way that this modern moral order takes shape around chosen identity makes it complicated for pastors. If the church or the pastor tries too hard to shape a person’s life, it will be a violation of the modern moral order.

The church loses personhood, and resonance (becoming alienated from life), when its relations are made into instruments for acquiring resources. And relationships that are made into instruments can be used only for accruing resources.