Day Off

Fridays, if all goes well, are a day off. All hasn’t exactly gone well this week (there are still a bunch of things, like finishing Christmas Eve and Advent planning, that are undone). 

But I am taking time for myself. I’m reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which everyone who is much smarter than me says is THE book describing how and why America has become “secular” and what that actually means. Taylor is a philosopher, and so in good philosopher form he’s really dense and makes a lot of leaps in his writing that I can’t follow. But the overall gist is great: we are “secular” because the way we think, associate, and ritualize, has changed from a collective, integrated worldview, to a worldview that largely supports individual meaning making. This transformation in the West, over centuries, has benefits and also drawbacks for human flourishing.

You don’t have to read Taylor. James Smith has a helpful little summary of A Secular Age that will give you the gist. But I think every pastor has to read Taylor and engage with his ideas. How do you know where to go if you don’t know where you are and how we got here?

I do like days off, to let my mind wander toward big things.