Tag: Culture
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Tillich’s Absolute Faith
For those most in the grip of the doubt and meaninglessness of our age, we have seen that none of the answers which served in past eras offer respite from despair. To take seriously our limitations, our ignorance both collectively and individually, our weakness, and human finitude, is to enter the darkness of existential anxiety.…
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Modern Doubt: Options
In this modern era, everything can be questioned. Traditional answers have no power to convince the skeptic; we no longer collectively assume and share a coherent reality, and we are capable of doubting any proposed order to our existence. Anyone who really pursues these questions comes to recognize the possibility of meaninglessness, of nothingness beneath…
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The Power of Doubt
In Paul Tillich’s retelling of changing culture and dominant human anxieties since antiquity, he emphasizes that modernity introduced, for the first time in human consciousness, the self-understanding of the person as an individual. Our identity is no longer merely as part of a collective mass of humanity, of some tribe or people, but we think…
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Our Shifting Anxieties
In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich offers his overview of three ages of Western thought and the cultural shifts these eras produced. His purpose is to explore the nature of Christian faith in each time, and so he identifies the nature of the fundamental human fears during those periods. Antiquity, he claims, was characterized…
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Lent and Blindness
The visible deceives, despite that it appears so substantial and trustworthy. Our eyes are not as reliable as they seem, even if they are the natural sense that we tend to trust most of all. This uncomfortable fact presents us with a dilemma, because what we cannot see, the invisible and mysterious things of God,…
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Lent & Active Emptiness
A fast during Lent encourages us to search for what we might release, and to look for something we hope to receive. Letting go makes room for what can come if we are open and have made space. Often what we receive is unexpected. Our hope can be superseded by what is given, though time…