Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Click Here to See Video from BBC World Service Monks headline Japan’s bars

Why did I post this video from the BBC with this headline? Well, those of you who are savvy know that Charles Taylor’s latest book, A Secular Age, won the Templeton Prize this past Spring. Taylor’s central notion is a rather innocuous one, that is, that secularism is not the antithesis of religion, but its companion in our contemporary world. Taylor is a Roman Catholic who is convinced that life lacks meaning without belief in God and that individualism — in its indifference to the concerns of the larger society — has taken us into a blind alley in the West. This has caused some incoherent gnashing of gums among those for whom the sacred and profane were definitively sundered sometime during the Enlightenment (through the work of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Samuel of Pufendorf, etc.). But like Hogen Natori, the Buddhist monk in the video, Taylor observes that “wherever people meet, there’s room for religion.”

I hope to write more about Charles Taylor and his work in future posts