In preparation for my participation in a USCCB sponsored symposium for the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’, I reread the famous and controversial document with some care.
Tag: modernity
Hercules, N.T. Wright, and the modern meta-narrative
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On the first day of my recent vacation, I perused N.T. Wright’s latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible.
A point that Wright makes in a number of the articles is that modernity and Christianity propose fundamentally different meta-narratives in regard to the meaning and trajectory of history.
The emergence of modernity
Modernity — at least in its Western form– is predicated on the assumption that history came to its climax in the mid- to late-18th century, with the definitive victory of empirical science in the epistemological arena and liberal democracy in the political arena.
Basic to this telling of the story is that modernity emerged victorious after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism and tyranny. The matrix for these negative states of affairs was none other than the Christian religion, which enforced a blind dogmatism on the one hand and an oppressive political arrangement on the other.