This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24).

Rather than being seen as the meaningful conclusion of a life and as the ascent to eternity, death comes to be regarded as the meaningless interruption of a life. This leads Weber to the conclusion that the commitment to earthly progress makes our lives meaningless rather than meaningful: “Because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is mea

expectation he cannot be defeated. In contrast, secular faith necessarily remains vulnerable. As long as you keep secular faith, you can be defeated by loss.

To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our li

Lewis thus illuminates my central distinction between living on (prolonging a temporal life) and being eternal (absorbed in a timeless existence).

Taylor emphasizes that the loss of loved ones is the experience that is hardest to bear in a secular age:

Because of the objective uncertainty, faith is a necessary condition of experience. Neither the past nor the future can be known and have to be taken on faith. This temporal condition—what I call the necessary uncertainty of secular faith—binds faith to risk from the beginning. Given that your relation to the past and the future depends on faith, y

Hence, the attempt to achieve social justice through the redistribution of capital wealth is inherently contradictory. The more welfare policies and state regulations that prevent the exploitation of living labor, the more restricted are the possibilities of extracting surplus value, and the less “wealth” is available to distribute in the economy.

The life that emerges has not always been (it is coming to be) and will not always be. The experience of beauty is therefore a stab in the heart, and he is seized by the desire to hold on to everything that will not last: “Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.” Seized by this desire, he has the

The true test of religious faith does not take place when things are going well, but “when the world commences its drastic ordeal, when the storms of life crush youth’s exuberant expectancy, when existence, which seemed so affectionate and gentle, changes into a pitiless proprietor who demands everything back.”23 The task is to confront the worst p