
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

Instead, Collins short-circuits the possibility of calling into question the ideal of eternal salvation. “It is certainly coherent,” he asserts, “to hope that a resolution of suffering and a fulfillment of human aspiration are possible, without knowing anything about what that is or might be.”18
Martin Hägglund • This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Even though he is fully invested in the prospect of eating the delicious meal, it makes no difference to him if it does not appear.
Martin Hägglund • This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
The key to the critique of capitalism is therefore the revaluation of value. The foundation of capitalism is the measure of wealth in terms of socially necessary labor time. In contrast, the overcoming of capitalism requires that we measure our wealth in terms of what I call socially available free time. As long as our measure of wealth is socially
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point, however, is that nothing can be at stake in life—that no purpose can matter—without running the risk of death. Life can matter only in light of death.
Martin Hägglund • This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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
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By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily in
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We have to take care of one another because we can die, we have to fight for what we believe in because it lives only through our sustained effort, and we have to be concerned with what will be passed on to coming generations because the future is not certain. This is the double movement of secular faith. You run ahead into the risk of irrevocable
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This Life addresses both religious and secular audiences. I invite the religious (and the religiously inclined) to ask themselves if they actually have faith in eternity and if this faith is compatible with the care that animates their lives. Furthermore, I encourage both religious and secular readers to see why the finitude of our lives should not
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This is how Abraham’s love of Isaac becomes an entirely internal affair, where any concern for Isaac in his own right is eliminated. By virtue of his religious faith, Abraham is no longer responsive to what actually befalls Isaac, or to how he may be feeling, except insofar as it aligns with Abraham’s own hopes. The impact of any negative outcome i
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