📗 Libro en inglés READING MODERNITY, MODERNISM AND RELIGION TODAY

Feelings of rootlessness fragmentation and loneliness are endemic in today s secular societies In the late nineteenth century Emile Durkheim described this kind of social malaise as anomie a concept which this book locates within a historical narrative of the emergence of Modernism from Modernity The book focuses on two representative figures Benedictus de Spinoza and Vincent van Gogh on whose work it offers some significant new perspectives Spinoza drew up a blueprint for Modernity which is to say the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation In counterpoint to his overriding confidence in reason a persistent current in Spinoza s writing shows how concerned he was about a possible loss of confidence in his governing idea of a single Substance the philosophical God with which he sought to replace the creator God of the Bible In promoting art as a means of filling the gap left by the absence of Spinoza s philosophical God and the failures of traditional Christianity Van Gogh also discovered the limitations of the vocation to which he had dedicated himself He concluded that in the tension between art and anomie a new kind of religious sensibility and understanding might emerge This