Mark C. Taylor > Quotes

“When understood in all its rich complexity, religion does not simply provide secure foundations but destabilizes every type of religiosity by subverting the oppositional logic of eitherjor.”
― Mark C. Taylor, After God

“Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem56 is actually a reductio hominis. “The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of the transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God.”
― Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology

“What makes so much contemporary debate pointless is that neither side realizes that secularity is a religious phenomenon,
which grows directly out of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it develops in Protestantism. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to insist that not only the modern but also the postmodern world effectively began with the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century.”
― Mark C. Taylor, After God

“The living body cannot be defined in terms of the binary opposites that structure conceptual reflection. The body is neither "subject nor object," neither "in itself" nor "for itself," neither res extensa nor res cogito. Rather the body is the mean between extremes—the "milieu" in which opposites like interiority and exteriority, as well as subjectivity and objectivity, intersect. Never reducible to the differences it simultaneously joins and separates, the body is forever entre-deux.”
― Mark C. Taylor, Altarity