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The Secular Mind (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "THROUGHOUT the history of Christianity the authority of the sacred has never been taken for granted as a compelling moral and spiritual given of unassailable..." (more)
Key Phrases: secular mind, captive mind, George Eliot, Miss Freud, Catholic Church (more...)

1.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Coles employs a gestalt method for describing contemporary spirituality in The Secular Mind, a memoirish meditation on the replacement of religion by science as the determining force of Western intellectual culture. The book offers a wide range of reflections on its eponymous topic, inspired by conversations Coles had with such figures as Paul Tillich, William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--all of whom felt conflicted about feeling comfortable living in both the secular and sacred realms. Coles also offers lively readings of the Bible, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Freud, and others, to demonstrate ancient and modern definitions of secular culture.

Coles's basic historical point is not very controversial: "Once an alternative to entrenched religious life ... secularity became an aspect of individualism, as societies became less and less dominated by church life, more and more capitalistic in nature." More interesting are his thoughts on the future of secularism. He predicts that the mind's curiosity will ultimately master the brain's most complex functions (including emotion and creativity). Yet for all his confidence in the power of psychopharmacology, Coles avers that the scientific victory will never be complete. There will always be need of "an 'otherness' to address through words become acts of appeal, of worried alarm, of lively and grateful expectation: please, oh please, let things go this way, and not in that direction." This "introspective, moral pause," Coles writes, is the secular mind's "very own kind of sanctity." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and social ethics and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis, is one of those rare writers who can gracefully combine intellectual rigor with the idiom of spiritual quest. Here, despite the title, Coles is concerned not just with the secular mind?the mind that exists and exerts its will in the contentious world?but with the blurry intersection of the secular and the sacred. "I try," he writes, "to explore this matter of two minds, secular thinking and its constant search for moral, if not spiritual, sanction." Over the years, Coles has interviewed notable theologians, psychiatrists, novelists and poets, juxtaposing their clinical and aesthetic takes on the psychology of the human soul with experiences of ordinary people. He discusses the writings of Freud, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, William Carlos Williams and Kierkegaard, among others. Throughout the book, Coles meditates on the paradox that it is as a scientist that he approaches questions traditionally deemed religious or spiritual. It's a paradox that, as Coles notes, manifests in many ways: Freud, who despised religion, became an object of "secular idolatry" as his work displaced the interior spiritual world that "had been the territory of religion." Coles also includes the not-at-all-famous, such as an Italian immigrant woman who realized the high cost of her Americanization: "When I prayed to God, I used to talk to Him, now I talk to myself." Finally, Coles assesses the impact of technology, including the possibility that science, in the form of neurology or genetics, may discern?and eventually mediate with drugs?human qualities, such as "goodness" or "badness," that once were in the realm of the spiritual. The brevity and conversational style of the book is deceptive; this is a potent and powerful work readers will think about and return to again and again.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 200 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691058059
ISBN-13: 978-0691058054
Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces

Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,943,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
THROUGHOUT the history of Christianity the authority of the sacred has never been taken for granted as a compelling moral and spiritual given of unassailable sway. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
secular mind, captive mind

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
George Eliot, Miss Freud, Catholic Church, Anna Freud, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jesus Christ, Miss O'Connor, New York City, Second World War, Sir Willoughby, Thomas Hardy, Union Theological Seminary

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 28 books:

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz on 4 pages
Fear and Trembling (Penguin Classics) by Soren Kierkegaard on 4 pages
The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud on 4 pages
Jude the Obscure (Signet Classics) by Thomas Hardy on page 80, page 88, and page 91
Childhood and Society by Erik H. Erikson on page 58, page 114, and page 158

See all 28 books this book cites

19 books cite this book:

By Way of Grace: Moving from Faithfulness to Holiness by Paula Huston on page 111, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Integrity is a Growth Market: Character Based Leadership by Alan Kolp and Peter Rea on page 16, and page 31
Enemies With Smiling Faces: Defeating the Subtle Threats That Endanger Christians by Donald C. Posterski in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Purpose-Directed Theology: Getting Our Priorities Right in Evangelical Conversations by Darrell L. Bock on page 20, and page 21
Civil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary Perspectives by Amyn B. Sajoo on page 242, and Back Matter

See all 19 books citing this book

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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars quirky insight into fundamental questions, July 25, 2001

By	Michael Guttentag (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Secular Mind (Paperback)

I am a Robert Coles fan. I remember him as the most inspiring lecturer at Harvard with his quiet and sincere voice. That said I have found most of his writing a disappointment. Finally, with "The Secular Mind" Coles has written a book that is accessible; it may not be as stirring as his lectures (which might show just how important his actual voice is), but at least with this book the reader can get a sense of the quirky and exciting way Coles strives to address the most basic human questions.

The reason this book succeeds more than his others is, I think, because it retains much of the spirit of his lectures. Coles takes a few simple questions: what is the difference between the religious life and the secular life? When, how and why has the secular way of thinking become more dominant in the last two hundred years? How do we deal with these changes given our shared desire for faith and purpose? Coles then consider how many thinkers he respects, including William Carlos Williams, Anna Freud, Dorthy Day, and Walker Percy, have responded to these questions. Part of what is unique about Coles is that he had the chutzpah to seek out and spend plenty of time with these thinkers. The result is a book that is intimate as well as profound.

But this book is not without its faults. I don't understand why Coles insists on making his books so inaccessible. For one thing, this book lacks any kind of index. And then there are his sentences. He can't resist the parenthetical. At every turn there is a clause within a clause. This sentence about George Elliot is typical: "She was, of course, decades ahead of Freud, in her acknowledgement, that way, of the unconscious, its raw power constantly assertive, no matter our notion of ourselves as in (conscious) control of what we say or do." (p. 65)

On balance, Coles is an interesting thinker, willing to raise the most profound personal questions about faith and purpose, and this book is a nice taste of his way of talking and thinking.

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20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Rambling disappointment, September 2, 1999

By A Customer

I'm a big Robert Coles fan, so perhaps my expectations were too high for this book. It purports to chart the "fate of the soul...in our constantly changing world," but instead seems to drift from chapter to chapter and even from paragraph to paragraph without direction. His favorite method of introducing the reader to legendary figures in politics, literature and the arts does not work here; he doesn't devote enough time to putting flesh on them (e.g. Kierkegaard, Darwin, Freud, Eliot, O'Connor). Re-read Harvard Diary instead.

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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing esp. at end, March 8, 2002

By	"henningrights" (New Haven, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secular Mind (Paperback)

I like Robert Coles' work - he's been an important influence on decades of Harvard undergraduates, of which I was one. This book was useful in some of his reflections - esp. of Walker Percy & Flannery O'Connor and their strategies for exposing the grande folie of the secular mind in an age when the sacred is often ignored, or even its presence not known of. But the end section, "looking ahead," revealed the underlying flaw of his somewhat rambling book - (were these speeches? they read like it - but there's no evidence in the book these were lectures). He seems to have bought into the "promise" of biology, through psychopharmacology, to reveal human truths and expose our mystery, as it were. So his book reads as an elegy for the sacred, bowing to the human mind here where not before (Freud, Communism, etc.) But, he brought up biology in the first place, in the context of how we once thought state-control (fascism and communism) would forever crush the human spirit - and it did not. What happened to his argument in the case of biology? My own thought, is that he has chosen to make his home at Harvard, which is the nerve-center of the secular mind in this country. He seems to have no self-awareness of this, so accepts scientific biology (Harvard Med School stuff) as the final word -the death-knell of the sacred. This left me feeling very unsatisfied - some defender of the sacred here, he does not earn the high ground to diagnose "the secular mind".

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars 2nd Grade theo-psychology
Mr. Cole seems to know little or nothing about what the religious mind really is. He limits and trivializes the "religious mind" to going to church and saying our prayers. Read more

Published on June 27, 2000 by freshroastedbanjokill

1.0 out of 5 stars Obvious Not Secular
Dr. Cole's 'The Secular Mind' is not as secular as either the cover or jacket summary would lead one to believe. While thought provoking, this is strickly subtle theology. Read more

Published on August 20, 1999

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