Last week, during the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, I had the enormous privilege of sharing a breakfast with Fr. Robert Spitzer, the inter-galactically smart Jesuit, who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the Magis Center on matters of faith, reason, and science. I had just finished Spitzer's latest book entitled The Soul's Upward Yearning and delighted in discussing it in some detail with him.
This text is, in my judgment, the best challenge to what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the "buffered self," a self isolated from any sense of the transcendent. Taylor observes that, prior to 1500, almost everyone believed in God and held that life would be meaningless apart from some reference to goods lying beyond our ordinary experience.
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