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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Religion, secularism and a new theology of culture, March 11, 2009
This review is from: After God (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
Complexity theory permeates many facets of life: social, biological, evolutionary, economic, artistic, political and religious, to name a few. Taylor uses the scientific theory of dynamic complex adaptive systems (CAS) to explain and reframe these issues with historical and contemporary relevancy. Using Luther's Protestant Reformation as a springboard, Taylor genealogically interprets religiosity and secularism as parallel vectors, each informing the other, demonstrating that there is codependency and interrelationship in and between religious and secular beliefs and practices. By clearly explaining the process of CAS, Taylor negotiates his notions of religion, language, art, market economies, evolution and global climate change as he uniquely integrates elements of "ethics without absolutes".
Taylor explores the binary opposition between the diachronic and synchronic origins of religion and frames these different but corresponding aspects as inseparable. Taylor compares and contrasts the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, and Marx et al. and rejects absolutist views of religion in favor of a relational framework for spontaneous organization in open systems. He holds that what is most important lies not at the center or in the extremes; rather, life develops and expresses itself at the edge of chaos, where creativity emerges over time. He studies the organization and constituents of CAS - recognizing patterns, feedback, adaptation, anticipation, and internal and external competition and cooperation - and in doing so, defines emergent creativity and life-sustaining processes.
He refigures the dialectics of opposition: either/or dualism and both/and monism, and instead endorses the need for an ascendancy of neither/nor thinking - the simultaneous possibilities that complexity entails - to usher in a new global ethic based on cooperation, negotiation and progressive adaptation. Ultimately, the trajectory of Taylor's argument results in the definition of life's richness and rhythm as a sublime state of interconnectedness. If substantial changes in our ethos and behavior are made, we stand to establish a constructive, agreeable, valuable and inclusive system rather than a destructive, divisive obsolescence that effectively subverts change and progress.
Taylor's book is well researched and eloquently written; he has succeeded in creating a book that forwards a unique theology of culture and philosophy of science, and elucidates new perspectives on the complexities of contemporary life systems, technology and models of creative insight into our changing world.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dangerous Territory, May 30, 2010
This review is from: After God (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
Taylor's "After God" is a daring yet irresistible and rewarding read. From a Christian perspective, it takes the reader into dangerous territory; dangerous but important, because it is only 'on the edge' that theologians make new discoveries. From an atheistic perspective, it gives pause for thought for those people who think they are immune to the influence of religion in general and Christianity in particular. For Taylor, "religion and secularity are not opposites; to the contrary Western secularity is a religious phenomenon" (p. xiii). To develop this, Taylor focuses on the idea "relationality". This means that the world cannot be understood in terms of divisions, dualisms or oppositions, but rather in terms of connections so that "After God, the divine is not elsewhere but is the emergent creativity that figures, disfigures, and refigures the infinite fabric of life" (p. xvii). Unless I missed something here, however, it was surprising that he did not refer to process theology. Nevertheless, it is a great read, brilliantly written, challenging and enticing. And along the way, there are some gems like his analysis of why religious liberals have gone quiet (p. 26) and Ratzinger's assault on John Kerry's presidential campaign (p. 287).
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best "chew" around at the moment, October 8, 2009
This review is from: After God (Religion and Postmodernism) (Paperback)
Lynn Paluga's review here presents the framework and the vocabulary that Taylor uses. In that guise, ostensibly it is new. To translate it into theology, however, Taylor resorts to explanations where a mere historical similarity of terminology about the death of God leaves more unsaid than said. The gaps he tries to fill remain yawning.
This review is critical, but it does not deny the worthwhile effort of Taylor's work. Furthermore, Taylor's heart is in the right place, and his head deals wonderfully with some consequences of the most difficult 20th Century erudition. I encourage a wide reading and study of the work, if only because it is one of the most readable and reputable efforts at synthesizing a view of where we have come from and where we are now and avoids the run-of-the-mill vagaries.
When you set yourself the task of showing how religion stands behind everything shaping contemporary culture, then you'd best not alert your readers with such familiar philosophical rules of thumb as "explaining all explains nothing." That images the very resistance that Hegel, Taylor's choice as his primary intellectual guide, met from logical positivists who had their fill, beyond capacity, of words. True, logical positivism has now faded from view as its self-contradictions have appeared. So it is to be expected that some, like Taylor, will sift through the old embers of totalistic systems like Hegel's, attempting to account for everything so far.
(However, one usually reads Hegel for ethics and Kant for epistemology and ontology. On the topic of imagination, I recommend Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Modern European Philosophy). Taylor cites the 1970s lectures by Dieter Henrich Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism who argues that Hegel resolves Kant's phenomenal/noumenal split. Taylor continues to wrestle with that issue by proposing "the virtual as immanent transcendence." This reader requires a comparison of that view with Kant's "synthetic apriori." Perhaps it appears in Henrich's "key" to Hegel, which also supports Taylor's suggestion that Emerson be read via Hegel. Emerson's "polarities" suffer and benefit from Hegel's key that "self-reference and determinateness as direct implications of one elementary, independent, and autonomous term: negation" in application. Hegel's ontology founded in his logic of being, essence, and notion ties it all together with its unique semantics. Yet that only resembles advanced math systems that are coherent and so far irrelevant. Such as those make Wittgenstein's plea to *show me what you mean by doing something* a life preserver amid the roaring winds.)
Academic religion (in contrast with the practice of religion, which cannot be taught in public universities) resorts to comprehensive generalizations for good reasons. First, it is long assumed that religion's job is to explain everything. Secondly, abstractions allow one to evade the accusation of proselytizing. Sometimes such abstracting gets too vast to do much good. I ended my read still holding my breath.(Update, please see my review of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature (SPEP) by Ted Toadvine, where additional philosophical justification for Taylor's affirmations is available.)
Yet I know of no one else, so far, who has tried to pull all the bits and pieces of legitimate religious critique together in one place and in such a readable form. Taylor gives us more bones to chew on while we wait expectantly. The worst mistake would be to bury the bone prematurely rather than draw such nourishment from it as it offers. It's a good gnaw.
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