The Re-Enchantment of the World Secular Magic in a Rational Age [Hardcover]

The Re-Enchantment of the Worldis an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as disenchanted. There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the progressive disenchantment of the world. Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces anarrayof strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many aspects or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

[T]he writers offer provocative and often brilliant meditations on the possibilities of secular modernity. The Re-Enchantment of the Worldultimately becomes richer for its internal diversity. Instead of offering a single argument, it reveals some of the competing agenda and concerns that have clustered around a recent area of critical inquiry, suggesting why it has captured so many scholars' attentions and where it might lead in the future. This interdisciplinary collection challenges the assumption that modernity's secular rationalism banished the sense of 'enchantment'wonder, mystery, sacredness, orderengendered by religion and myth in earlier times. The 13 contributors discuss attempts to fill the void left by 'the death of God.' These include responses to nature famously detailed by Henry David Thoreau, the less accessible philosl£Ý