Sublime

People suffering from time deprivation or information overload may not be addicted or driven or out of touch with the higher purpose of life. They may be tied to their meetings and computers against their will—by the need to hold on to a job. Individualized Sabbatarianism may change life for the lucky few, but it won’t help the many.

Of course every age has had its morally lax people, and people who have forsaken ideals and commitments to pursue their heart’s desire. In fact, every one of us Christians is like that at times; it’s called sin. What’s distinct about the present age, says Taylor, is that “today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel

As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted from community, family, and church to commercialized or privately improvised forms—the streets, the cafés, and resorts—the resulting consciousness of individualized freedom involved more and more estrangement from older ties, and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of

But Taylor rightly points out that despite the discussions of philosophers, the argument from evil never had anything like popular appeal and broad attraction until some time after the Enlightenment.

In general, idols can be good things (family, achievement, work and career, romance, talent, etc. — even gospel ministry) that we turn into ultimate things to

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like,

It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.