Sublime

Rauschenbusch’s genius was to repopulate the metaphysical realm.

With Rosa and Charles Taylor, I’m maintaining that our shared and contested sense of the good life is fundamental to our ways of being in the world. Therefore, I agree that technological acceleration has shifted the imagination of the church.

(A major issue that conservatives even today have yet to solve is how, in opposing the reductions of the immanent frame, they can avoid the perception of being against justice and mercy and can support all humans flourishing.)

Augustine is our contemporary. He has directly and indirectly shaped the way we understand our pursuits, the call to authenticity.

When a congregation’s identity is in its resources, it is on an accelerating pace that alienates it from the world, making it excarnate in thought and practice.

churches that can thrive in our secular age.

The purpose of the cultural analysis above is to show that when the good life is sped up to living multiple lifetimes (intragenerational), the decay rate is short and the present is compressed—which puts the denomination in crisis.

Soon enough, the most central question for both mainline and evangelical pastors was, How can we reach more and more people? They did not ask how they could testify to God’s eternity breaking into time. They asked how they could keep from losing pace up against the threat of secular 2.

The authority of community, both in the present tense and across time (tradition), is a guardrail that keeps individuals from veering into heresy.