Faith in a secular age …

… Charles Taylor and the Communion of the Saints | Dale M. Coulter | First Things.

Taylor’s prescription for our secular age remains connected to his reading of Christian tradition, in particular his understanding of the communion of the saints. Within this communion, Taylor notes, there are a variety of models for how conversion unfolds in the life of a person. By “communion of the saints,” Taylor means: “a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries toward God.” The church consists concretely of diverse peoples with different itineraries toward God that will be finally resolved only at the eschaton. Given that the desire for the transcendent remains embedded within the constitution of the human person, what helps the late-modern self to break out of the immanent frame is to see the rich tapestry of conversion that the church embodies in her life. It is no longer the relationship between the great Gothic cathedrals on the medieval landscape and the scholastic cathedrals of the mind; rather, it is the messy, sometimes chaotic, flow of men and women toward God.