NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 75, Issue 3/4, 2021

Abstract The idea of a Catholic modernity, first introduced by Charles Taylor in 1996, offers a third “grand strategy” of relating modernity and religion (transcendence) in our time. In this introduction, the project is presented: six leading authors from different religious traditions (David and Bernice Martin, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Cummings Neville, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jonathan Boyarin) examine the ide Read More

Abstract After a critical examination of western master narratives of modernization and secularization, David Martin focuses, first, on one of the variants of Christian modernity, Anglican modernity. The Anglican Church provides a simulacrum of the universal church as it ranges from the Catholic to the Evangelical and Pentecostal and is, hence, rigged also by many of the problems confronting the church in the contempor Read More

Abstract There are somewhere between 200 million and 600 million Pentecostal/ Charismatic Christians in the world today. Most of them live in the “majority world,” and two thirds are women. Pentecostals are proud of being modern and frequently boast of it. Yet “Pentecostal modernity” is not a straightforward clone of the intellectual and political history of Europe and the North Atlantic. It contains paradoxical elements that ca Read More

Abstract This essay first outlines the distinctive and significant features of Taylor’s interpretation of modernity and secularization, especially, his emphasis on the immanent frame within a naturalism closed to transcendence. The essay then offers some different perspectives, not intended as a critique of Taylor, but rather to underscore elements in need of greater emphasis. My perspective acknowledges more lines of continui Read More

Abstract I want to engage Taylor with a comparative Confucian vision of modernity. In order to do this, I need to present a metaphysics which can serve as a framework for comparisons necessary for a global philosophical historical perspective on modernity and transcendence and in which, in particular, I can represent both Christian and Confucian categories as alternative specifications of ultimate reality. Using non-personalisti Read More

Abstract Taylor characterizes Western modernity as being very inhospitable to the transcendent, yet also as opening an opportunity for a renewed engagement with the transcendent from within modernity. This debate is also vivid in Islam and I will reconstruct it by focusing on the concept of time (dahr). Some strains in Islam condemned the posture of maximizing the “flourishing of life” within the limits of (a life)time as dahriy Read More

Abstract For two main reasons, I am not much tempted to articulate a “Jewish modernity” analogous to “a Catholic modernity” as presented by Charles Taylor. First, modernity is “lost”. In the last decades, dreams of a bright secular future of modernity (“later is better”) have collapsed. This affects also the possible role one envisages for non-scientific allegiances and worldviews. It renders this engagement with Taylor seem al Read More

Abstract In this essay, I comment on the contributions of the six authors who have critically reflected on my notion of a ‘Catholic Modernity’ from their own perspectives. Selecting particular issues from these authors to comment on was challenging due to the richness of each contribution. I comment, among others, on the crucial question of religious violence and intolerance in our world and the related issue of how to deal Read More

Abstract This essay develops central themes which I have originally set out in my lecture “A Catholic Modernity?” of 1996. I extend those initial reflections by offering further considerations which I have elucidated over the last 25 years. These include the significance of understanding disenchantment and unbundling in coming to terms with the changes involved in modernity. I also sketch a multi-layered hermeneutical Read More

Abstract In a time when the two major strategies followed by Christian religious traditions in modernity have lost traction—Christendom and subcultural isolation on the one hand and liberal and socialist assimilation with modernity on the other hand—Charles Taylor’s Catholic modernity idea opens up a “third grand strategy,” a new perspective on the relationship between religion and modernity. Moreover, the perspectiv Read More