Sublime

Human flourishing could be achieved in a fully secular way.17

After all, in Secular 3 righteousness is not our pursuit (as it would have been five hundred years ago), making frameworks of sacrifice, atonement, honor, and duty appear more as dusty relics than the pursuits of present existence. Rather, our desire is authenticity. Authenticity makes all hierarchical thoughts of justifying atonement seem ever odd

This community is living a good life (it is a life-community), not because it has a storehouse of resources through speed and innovation but because it has the resonance of shared personhood.

Merold Westphal,

the very way Paul’s contention and Secular 3 collide breaks open a way for us to imagine “in Christ” as a transcendent (mystical) union even in our time.

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

by making the secular sacred it inadvertently created a context where the sacred could ultimately become secular.

But such a statement, as Bonhoeffer would point out, sees the future of the church not in Jesus Christ but in the young themselves.

the other portrayals were, in a phrase of Fergus Kerr, “unavoidable anthropomorphisms.” See Kerr, After Aquinas, 77;