A Divine Seed

From one perspective, the religious life can seem like a refuge for men and women holding too tightly to an outdated mode of existence. From another, it can seem like the last refuge against a secular world firmly opposed to the truths of religious tradition. Sensing the Spirit: Toward the Future of Religious Life, Judith A. Merkle’s intervention into the question of the religious in a secular frame, is neither a surrender to the secular world nor a retreat from it. In fact, Merkle is not making an argument for the continued relevance of religious life at all. She insists that it is relevant and important because it still exists—and it must now adapt to the changed landscape of religious belonging in what Charles Taylor (one of her main interlocutors) calls the “secular age.”