{"id":1272,"date":"2009-10-30T11:30:16","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T15:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1272"},"modified":"2022-01-26T16:30:01","modified_gmt":"2022-01-26T20:30:01","slug":"harvey-cox-and-the-future-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/10\/harvey-cox-and-the-future-of-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvey Cox and the Future of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HarveyI mentioned Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian best-known for his 1960s book The Secular City<\/em>, in my recent Guardian<\/em> piece on “death of God” theology<\/a>. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I have an interview with him<\/a> about his recent retirement ceremony, the legacy of his early-career bestseller, and his latest work, The Future of Faith<\/em>, which makes an earnest call for embracing the recent trend toward discourses of “spirituality” rather than “belief” or “faith.”<\/p>\n

NS: Some have criticized these spiritual tendencies as overly individualistic and even anti-political\u2014Robert Bellah\u2019s Habits of the Heart<\/em>, for instance. How does your Age of Spirit deal with what Bellah and his co-authors were concerned about: a retreat from the political and social sphere?<\/p>\n

HC: I don\u2019t think that spirituality is necessarily a retreat from social life. It can be. Of course, orthodox religiosity can be as well, and it is for a lot of people. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much to be lost or gained there. The question now is how spirituality is going to be institutionalized to make it more socially and politically effective. It\u2019s at a formative stage now, and you can see it developing. I have a section in the book on the Sant\u2019Egidio community, which is one of my favorite examples. I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they\u2019re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they\u2019re a model, and they\u2019re not the only one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a controversial claim, one that has been interesting me more and more lately.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"HarveyI mentioned Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian best-known for his 1960s book The Secular City<\/em>, in my recent Guardian<\/em> piece on “death of God” theology<\/a>. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I have an interview with him<\/a> about his recent retirement ceremony, the legacy of his early-career bestseller, and his latest work, The Future of Faith<\/em>, which makes an earnest call for embracing the recent trend toward discourses of “spirituality” rather than “belief” or “faith.”<\/p>\n

NS: Some have criticized these spiritual tendencies as overly individualistic and even anti-political\u2014Robert Bellah\u2019s Habits of the Heart<\/em>, for instance. How does your Age of Spirit deal with what Bellah and his co-authors were concerned about: a retreat from the political and social sphere?<\/p>\n

HC: I don\u2019t think that spirituality is necessarily a retreat from social life. It can be. Of course, orthodox religiosity can be as well, and it is for a lot of people. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much to be lost or gained there. The question now is how spirituality is going to be institutionalized to make it more socially and politically effective. It\u2019s at a formative stage now, and you can see it developing. I have a section in the book on the Sant\u2019Egidio community, which is one of my favorite examples. I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they\u2019re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they\u2019re a model, and they\u2019re not the only one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a controversial claim, one that has been interesting me more and more lately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,54,80,47,55,26],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-books","tag-conversation","tag-empathy","tag-generation","tag-language","tag-new-religious-movements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5522,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/5522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}