Overview

Faith in Secular Life finds signals of transcendence in the most unlikely places. Drawing on film, novels, popular culture, music, sport and secular buildings, the Very Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy shows that the modern world teems with transcendent debris. He tracks how quotidian 'Implicit Religion' (a term coined by Edward Bailey, 1935-2015) reveals sacred currents lying just beneath the surface of 'secular' life. Following Bailey, Percy holds that the lens of Implicit Religion is essentially 'bifocal' in nature. It allows simultaneous focus on elements in the foreground and aspects which lie at a greater distance. Observing immediate, ordinary human activity against the more distant horizon of 'secularisation', Bailey's bifocal aperture brought the two together and placed them in a single framework for discussion. However, whilst Implicit Religion was fundamentally about identifying people's commitments, Faith in Secular Life pursues the idea further to analyse specific areas of contemporary culture which would normally be seen as faithless. Individuals may be unconscious that their actions can be understood as 'religious', yet, Percy maintains, their participation remains saturated with sacredness and spirituality.

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Reviews

This very creative and provocative book explores the landscape of 'God being found abroad' beyond the established religion of the church. The institutional phase of Christianity is effectively over, now replaced by multiple networks of socio-spiritual-political values. Spiritual writing is a congested field, but steeped as he is in the literature and many conversations, I consider Martyn Percy to be prophetic and unparalleled in his ability to find a way through the debris. I highly recommend his book. - The Revd Prof. Sir Iain Torrance (President Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary)

Author Information

The Very Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the Provost Theologian for Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui and Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Saint Joseph Macao. He also works as Senior Research Associate at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, and as a Research Professor of Theology at the University of Bern, with further Fellowships at Edinburgh, London and Oxford universities. He writes and teaches on culture, faith, values and public life, and contributes to Prospect, The Guardian and The Times.

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