Episode 242: Being Christian in a Secular Age—Discussion 5: Glimpses of Transcendence

Notes from the Undercroft

Being Christian in a Secular Age: A Pilgrimage
Session 5—A New Kind of Secular: Glimpses of Transcendence
Over the span of five episodes, I'm joined by the Rev'd Justin McIntosh, Rector of St Paul's Episcopal Church in Ivy, Virginia to discuss Being a Christian in a Secular Age. In this fifth discussion, we put the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy in conversation with the understanding of our Secular Age that we have gotten from Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, David Bentley Hart, and Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. We appeal especially to the work of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock to re-orient ourselves to this Sacramental Cosmos that just is the Creation of the God revealed in Jesus Christ. This reawakening to glimpses of transcendence is more available to us now than it was to our immediate predecessors because the Secular is not actually the sphere of disenchanted, mechanistic atheism we've been told but a bustling marketplace of metaphysical ideas and spiritualities, where Truth and Beauty are constantly breaking in like shafts of light through stained glass windows.