Sublime

continue the slow, perpetual rebuilding of that inner structure which, in his view, it was the main purpose of life to rebuild.

unchanged from the original published forms, although I have made a few adjustments - such as adding some additional footnotes and providing section headings in those essays where there were none in the original.In the subtitle I have chosen for this volume, I have characterized my various explorations as being in Kuyper's "line." The expression is

Augustine might make Christianity plausible again for those who’ve been burned—who suspect that the “Christianity” they’ve seen is just a cover for power plays and self-interest, or a tired moralism that seems angry all the time, or a version of middle-class comfort too often confused with the so-called American Dream.

In his important book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously says, “I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?’”

All great artists are, said Arnold, imbued with ‘the aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they find it’.

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”

Taylor faults the Protestant Reformation and modern evangelical Christianity for disenchanting the world and turning the focus on the self rather than on God through shared religious rituals.