“Acedia had been understood by earlier Christians as a ‘hatred of place and even life itself,’ as one desert father put it. For the monk ensconced in his cell, acedia struck in the long hours of the afternoon, when time moved slowly and any task other than prayer seemed desirable.
So afflicted, the monk would sink into a torpor, sometimes manifesting itself as listlessness, but just as often driving him into a frenzy of action, anything to escape the awful work of prayer. Whether indolent or busy, the slothful monk refused his task, hating work, place, and form of life.” Professor RJ Snell

“But really, anywhere throughout the autumnal world of old and dying Christendom, there are instants (however fleeting) when one cannot help but feel (however imprecisely) that something vital has perished, a cultural confidence or a spiritual aspiration; and it is obviously something inseparable from the faith that shaped and animated European civilisation for nearly two millennia.” Professor DA Hart

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. (Matthew Arnold: 1867)

‘The beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs. Furthermore, even after they are radically secularised, such cultural creations as social institutions, technology, moral ideas, and arts, cannot be correctly understood if one does not know their original religious matrix, which they tacitly criticised, modified, or rejected in becoming what they are now: secular cultural values. —Mircea Eliade A New Humanism

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do…But it’s not so clear in what this secularity consists.” —Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.” Professor David Bentley Hart The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Nietszche may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.”
Professor David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.” David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants.” David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

‘We offer a vision of a society at ease with itself  in which all feel at home as part of an ongoing national story and to which all wish to, and are encouraged to, contribute to the common good’ (University of Warwick, Living With Difference, p11)