Religious sensibility and the Modern Experience

This research will describe a personal metaphysical theology with reference to selected books published in the contemporary period. The research will set forth the basis on which religious sensibility penetrates modern experience, and then discuss ways in which a variety of commentators have sought to work out difficulties implied by the encounter between the onrush of modern novelty and the search for personal meaning and stability.

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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