{"id":461,"date":"2012-04-29T19:49:17","date_gmt":"2012-04-29T18:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hargaden.com\/kevin\/?p=461"},"modified":"2012-04-29T19:50:25","modified_gmt":"2012-04-29T18:50:25","slug":"one-quote-review-formations-of-the-secular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/2012\/04\/29\/one-quote-review-formations-of-the-secular\/","title":{"rendered":"One Quote Review: Formations of the Secular"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular<\/a>, which Eoin O’Mahony<\/a> has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got about 30% of what was on offer. <\/p>\n

It is probably bad form to use as a quote, something that he quotes but I’ll do it anyway. Footnote 65 on page 47 lets us into a brilliant conversation Asad begins. When I talk with people about secularism, the Christian usually thinks it is about politically laying the ground for mass persecutions to follow and the non-Christian usually thinks it is about fostering reasonable conversation and secure freedom in the face of faith-based irrationalism. Cutting through this shite, Asad asks us (as one of many perplexing and illuminating questions) instead to consider whether pain has a meaning or not. Secularism won the day not when it drove prayer out of schools but when it stripped our owies<\/em> of certain kinds of metaphysical explanations. Thus:<\/p>\n

Their pain became totally secular since pain as well as illness were seen as nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order; this interpretation called for a fundamental social reorganization when its standards (chastity in particular) went against nature. This explains why, as a leitmotiv, the physician of the Enlightenment maintained that in order to be a good moralist, one must first be a good physician, thus reversing the traditional relationship between medicine and morality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.<\/p>\n

Your Correspondent, Is off home to think of a lie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hugely enjoyed Talal Asad’s Formations Of The Secular, which Eoin O’Mahony has been pressing into my hands since I first met him. It is a worthy ally to Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is one of those books that I suspect I must carefully re-read because even taking close notes, I reckon I got … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “One Quote Review: Formations of the Secular”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/kevin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}