• "Encountering the Secular is an unusually
imaginative work. Atchley’s writing is engaging, producing
a thoughtful philosophical meditation. Drawing on remarkable juxtapositions
of texts and materials—ranging from well-established philosophers
to novelists, films, and popular culture—Atchley weaves an
argument of his own."—Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University,
author of After God
•"Written in eloquent and often moving prose, J. Heath
Atchley's Encountering the Secular provides a much-needed
reevaluation of the secular. On Atchley's reading, following insights
of the theologian Paul Tillich, transcendence becomes the source
and symptom of our estrangement from a depth dimension of life and
leads to the painful divide of theology and culture, the religious
and the secular."—Jeffrey L. Kosky, Washington and Lee
University, author of Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion
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Encountering the Secular:
Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture |
| |
| J. Heath Atchley |
| 200 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2781-7 • $49.50 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2782-4 • $19.50 |
 |
In Encountering the Secular, J. Heath Atchley proposes
an alternative to the understanding of the secular as that which
opposes the religious, and he turns to American and Continental
philosophy to support his critique. Drawing from thinkers as disparate
as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gilles Deleuze, and engaging with contemporary
literature and film, Atchley shows how the division of experience
(individual, cultural, political) into the distinct realms of
the religious and the secular overlooks the subtle ways in which
value can emerge. Far from arguing that the religious and the
secular are the same, he means instead to suggest that the dogmatic
separation between these two realms gets in the way of experiencing
an immanent value, a kind of value tied neither to a transcendent
reality (e.g., a god or an ideal) nor to a self-centered reality
(e.g., pleasure or knowledge).
Each chapter cultivates a particular concept that challenges
the breach between the secular and the religious, rendering that
breach ambiguous. Such ambiguity, the author affirms, is relevant
to a time when rigid and simplistic notions of religion and secularity
are used to justify thoughtlessness and even violence. All too
often the secular is thought of either as a triumph in “overcoming”
the presumed irrationality and oppression of religion, or as lament
in “losing” the meaning religion is thought once to
have offered. Atchley suggests a view of the secular as an opportunity
to experience an immanent value that is neither controlled by
the human self nor conferred by a divine entity.
Written in a prose that is lucid, lively, and provocative, Encountering
the Secular shows how a philosophical endeavor might be understood
as a spiritual practice.
J. Heath Atchley is a Research Associate
at Mount Holyoke College.
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