released 9/14/2018
Modern societies typically hold to certain allegedly self-evident truths about the nature of knowledge. Lurking imperceptibly behind these “truths’ is a story of human progress away from superstition into the light of Reason. In his book Returning to Reality, philosopher Paul Tyson imagines a grand “Song of Modernity.” In it, he captures the triumphant (and anti-Christian) sense of enlightenment characteristic of modern thought. On this Friday Feature, Ken Myers summarizes some of the key themes in Tyson’s book, and reads his instructive “Song of Modernity.”
17 minutes
PREVIEW
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Paul Tyson’s 2018 Areopagus Lecture was entitled “Escaping the Silver Chair: Renewed Minds and Our Vision of Reality.” Tyson explored how the Christian responsibility “to repent” involves more than expressing feelings of regret for moral wrong-doing and the desire to reform. Rather, the New Testament call to “repentance,” the English rendition of the Greek word metanoia, is inseparable from radically reenvisioning what is “really real.” St. Paul’s admonition that we be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” — in other words, metanoia — invokes a process that demands the recognition and rejection of various false enchantments of this world. With the help of C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair, however, we realize that identifying and then escaping the ways in which we are bewitched is no easy task.