Religious sensibility and the Modern Experience

It is the paradox of the divine in the modern age that its quintessence for individuals is the problem of what Kierkegaard famously called a sickness unto death. That seems a vicious irony. As the saying is, If God be God, he is not good; if God be good, he is not God. For if God is good, and almighty, how, then, does his creation encounter such a great amount of suffering, sorrow, and anxiety? Why does anxiety--and the failure to conquer it--seem to be the most powerful feature of modern life? Philosophers have sought to answer this problem throughout history, and their modern counterparts have done the same thing.

By no means are the modern efforts the work of professionally trained theologians and philosophers. Indeed, some of the most widely read books that diagnose the difficulties of coping with modernity have such widely diverse subjects as business management, the special qualities of Western industrial capitalism, anticapitalist New Age discourse that offers a critique of bourgeois capitalist culture, and traditional attempts at clarify

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itarianism that is particularly hostile to Catholic liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America during the 1960s. As for the World Council of Churches (a Protestant-dominated umbrella organization), it began in Stockholm in 1925, when the push for international peace was especially strong in Europe, which was still recovering from the Great War. But WCC's institutional character has dominated its activities in recent decades, with the result that it was not well positioned to engage in serious ethical dialogue in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union or to look at the ethical implications of the technology-driven global economy vis-a-vis population pressures, the growing global gap between rich and poor, and the environmental consequences of economic preoccupations. The result, Preston concludes, is that a condition of an stand-off or stalemate exists among religious institutions, as far as their deliberate quest for social justice is concerned. His diagnosis of institutions that should be a beacon to troubled souls is very pessimistic, and would not seem to offer much hope for anyone who is already in a state of anxiety about day-to-day experience and hope for the future. That is, the religions themselves are trouble
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Approximate Word count = 2451
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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