Being Taught

From the end of a New Yorker tidbit about the Catholic scandals : “Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher.”

A friend writes to say: A trifle 9/10 in tone, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times ’ website, Stanley Fish—reliable as the bellwether of hipster intellectuals— writes about the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ turn to post-secularity: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

Not that there’s any connection.