Monday, April 4, 2011

Searching for the sacred in our lives: All Things Shining


Notes:

Sean Dorrance Kelly is the head of the philosophy department at Harvard University

The book being talked about is: All Things Shining: Reading the western classics to find meaning in a secular age

Take Aways:

Its hard for many people to find what matters to them in our age and that means our time is different than the culture and societies of our recorded history.

Some individuals have religious beliefs that they can connect to the sacred (and see the world as shining as opposed to the dull - or non-shining view - that the lack of connection to the sacred in our lives can bring to a person's perception of life and the world we live in). i.e. for many people connecting to the sacred is difficult as they move through the challenges of secular society.

To learn more read the review in the New York Times (short extract below):

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and his former student Sean Dorrance Kelly have a story to tell, and it is not a pretty tale for us moderns. Ours is an age of nihilism, they say, meaning not so much that we have nothing in which to believe, but that we don’t know how to choose among the various things to which we might commit ourselves. Looking down from their perches at Berkeley and Harvard, they see the “human indecision that plagues us all.” In “All Things Shining” they offer readings of classic texts to show both how we got into this mess and how we can overcome it.

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