David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and wisdom. We’ve been going five days a week in recent months, but starting in May, we’re going to be going live on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have lots of prerecorded content if you’ve got to do something in the morning at 9:00 a.m., but we will be live on Tuesdays and Thursdays through the summer season, and then we will begin a new program year after the leaves begin to turn. This week. I want to look at the question of a common task, and this is a major point of discussion right now in our culture. I want to go back to someone I’ve mentioned several times, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. His book from 2007 “A Secular Age” is considered game changing in terms of secularity and theological speculation. He has this to say about our contemporary era, “The dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.” This is a constant within the more theologically inclined philosophers to say that secularity is about me, me, me, and that the more religious aspects of culture are about us. So that’s what I want to kind of think about this week is, is that true? And if it is true, what does that mean, etc.? So that’s kind of the starting point on our theological and sociological speculations for the week.

One of the right wing think tanks does a an online magazine called “First Things”. It calls itself “America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life”. And one of the things that came out a couple of years ago was a manifesto from this group called “Against the Dead Consensus”. And this is a conservative Christian speaking. And they say, “We believe home matters. For those who enjoy the upsides, a borderless world brings intoxicating new liberties. They can go anywhere, work anywhere. They can call themselves ‘citizens’ of the world. But the jet-setters’ vision clashes with the human need for a common life, and it has bred resentments that are only beginning to surface. We embrace the new nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that in practice leads to universal tyranny. Whatever else might be said about it, the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew. We will guard that space jealously and we respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate.” So here is a right wing think tank group of a lot of ministers and Christian thinkers saying that the new nationalism is a good idea. It’s putting us back in a an “us” phenomenon that has been ignored within secular humanism, as they would call it. Yesterday’s New York Times for April 24, 2021. Ross Douthat, one of the opinion columnists, he is a Roman Catholic and conservative thinker, said “The Two Crises of Conservatism”, He headlines things yesterday. “The GOP doesn’t know how to win majorities. The right doesn’t know what it’s conserving any more.” Well, that’s an interesting that kind of argument. He says, “But beneath this party crisis, there is the deeper one having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve.” Two weeks ago, for Coffee and Wisdom, we did discuss this idea that liberalism doesn’t mean being liberal, as it does in the U.S., entirely.