Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age

Desmond and the Quest for God

Ryan G. Duns, SJ, Ryan G. Duns SJ

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780268029012, 9780268102210
• eBook ISBN: 9780268108151
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophers

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, faced with contemporary challenges to belief, issues a call for "new and unprecedented itineraries" that might be capable of leading seekers to encounter God. In Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, Ryan G. Duns demonstrates that William Desmond's philosophy has the resources to offer a compelling response to Taylor. To show how, Duns makes use of the work of Pierre Hadot. In Hadot's view, the point of philosophy is "not to inform but to form"—that is, not to provide abstract answers to abstruse questions but rather to form the human being such that she can approach reality as such in a new way. Drawing on Hadot, Duns frames Desmond's metaphysical thought as a form of spiritual exercise. So framed, Duns argues, Desmond's metaphysics attunes its readers to perceive disclosure of the divine in the everyday. Approached in this way, studying Desmond's metaphysics can transform how readers behold reality itself by attuning them to discern the presence of God, who can be sought, and disclosed through, all things in the world.

Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age offers a readable and engaging introduction to the thought of Charles Taylor and William Desmond, and demonstrates how practicing metaphysics can be understood as a form of spiritual exercise that renews in its practitioners an attentiveness to God in all things. As a unique contribution at the crossroads of theology and philosophy, it will appeal to readers in continental philosophy, theology, and religious studies broadly.

NOTES

Foreword

1. Augustine, De trinitate 14.5: ab inferioribus ad superiora ascendentes uel ab exterioribus ad interiora ingredientes.

Introduction

1. Dupré, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, 139.

2. Desmond, God and the Between, 338.

3. Taylor, A Secular Age, 25.

4. Rahner, “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” 15.

5. Imhof and Biallowons, Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982, 176.

6. Taylor, A Secular Age, 755.

7. Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 114. All emphasis in quoted material in this book is original unless otherwise indicated.

8. Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in Dover Beach and Other Poems, 86–87.

9. Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others, 41.

10. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 47.

11. Desmond, God and the Between, xii.

12. Kearney, Anatheism, xi.

13. Elie, The Life You Save Might Be Your Own, x.

ONE Beating the Bounds of A Secular Age

1. Taylor, A Secular Age, 307.

2. Ibid.

3. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious” (2015), http://www.pewforum.org/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/.

4. Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity; Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God; and Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 180.

6. Dupré, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, 133.

7. Crowley, “Mystagogy and Mission: The Challenge of Nonbelief and the Task of Theology,” 12.

8. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 11.

9. Ibid.

10. Taylor, A Secular Age, 592.

11. Ibid., 2–3. See also Ruth Abbey, “Theorizing Secularity 3,” in Colorado and Klassen, ed., Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, 98–124.

12. Taylor, A Secular Age, 20.

13. Epstein, Good without God.

14. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 13–14.

15. Taylor, A Secular Age, 539.

16. Taylor, A Secular Age, 307.

17. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 132.

18. Taylor, A Secular Age, 309.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 311.

21. Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 3–23.

22. See Jon Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age,” in Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 193–216. Butler writes that A Secular Age could have been “half its size, even a third, because fewer pages would almost inevitably have forced more focused arguments and clearer expositions” (197).

23. Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments, 34–60.

24. This is not counted a gain by all readers. Although Taylor limits his scope to “Latin Christendom,” some critics have resisted ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Foreword William Desmond
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Beating the Bounds of A Secular Age
• Two A Crack in Everything: Introducing William Desmond’s Metaphysics
• Three The Poetics of the Between: Metaxological Metaphysics as Spiritual Exercise
• Four Exercising Transcendence: Indirect Ways to God
• Five Epiphanic Attunement
• In(con)clusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index