During Pope Francis’s stateside visit I wrote a post arguing that his rapturous reception from our ostensibly-secular media was partial evidence for secularism’s relative weakness, notwithstanding certain recent de-Christianizing trends in the United States. For a very different sort of evidence, I recommend this personal essay in the latest Elle Magazine, in which Lisa Chase, the widow of the late Peter Kaplan — the beloved New York Observer editor, dead untimely of cancer in 2013 — describes her experiences communicating with what she thinks (not-unreasonably, on the evidence presented) is Peter’s “discarnate” spirit.
The essay is a dispatch from the heart of what we think of as hyper-secular America: Not just New York City, not just upper-middle class white liberal New York City, but literary/journalistic New York City. But it’s clear as the story progresses that the author’s experience is not some outlying intrusion of the pre-modern into a thoroughly materialistic milieu; from the beginning her experiences are informed and steered and ratified by a social network (friends, psychiatrists, doctors) in which encounters with the numinous are accepted, however quietly and slightly nervously, as a part of the normal run of human life.
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