Bloom in the Fields of the Lord

Most accounts of modernity treat the advent of secularism as a central force in our world. From Weber’s study of the decline of sacralized societies to postmodern theories of the flattening of all value and affect, the modern is regarded as insistently this-worldly, to be measured only by standards of its own devising. Yet the religious sensibility, with its longing for some transcendent source of value, persists and, in some of its fundamentalist manifestations, even seems to be on the rise. How to account for this? Does it invalidate all theories of modernization? Will some larger cycle in human history be revealed only as we again embrace other-worldly, sacred modes of thought, and social organization is realigned with nonration...