"We live in a godless world". So begins Tara Isabella Burton's inquiry (2020) into religious practices in the Secular Age. Burton observes, like many others, that people are becoming more religiously unaffiliated, but proposes they still seek what religion traditionally provides, just differently. Many do not reject religion, instead they "remix" it through strange rites, having fun in a way that "John Milton's Satan is fun". The "Remixed", she says, desire "a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life" (Burton 2020: 10). Significantly, "the affirmation of life", writes the philosopher Charles Taylor (1996: 18), is "a powerful constitutive strand of modern western spirituality". Thereby, the religious and the religiously unaffiliated seem similar. Both seek the spiritual in ordinary life, welcoming participation from the "laity". The "Remixed" seem quite successful creating social cohesion, as they celebrate diversity, in such magical places as New York City's McKittrick Hotel, a performance art space. The elements shaping and influencing the "Remixed" as a community of practice are not my focus, yet I wonder about church-goers, such as Catholics, especially with the loss of Latin as a shared language of worship.
To explore this question, I provide a thematic analysis of stakeholder discourse, namely Catholics concerning the use of the vernacular for worship on the social media platform Reddit.com. For centuries, a mutual suspicion has existed between the Catholic Church and the forces of modernity. Yet with Vatican II (1962-1965), the Church officially "opened its windows" to the modern world. For instance, the decree Sacrosantum Concilium allowed languages other than Latin. Significant for understanding a community of practice is that a preliminary review of the discourse on "R/Catholic", a subreddit, reveals a divided Catholic laity. These divisions have implications for engendering a community of practice for the transcendent within modernity.
Following the thematic analysis, I discuss the significance of the themes in relation to the dynamics between social cohesion and the role of shared languages. I conclude by situating the stakeholder discourse within Taylor's "Catholic Modernity". Taylor's views may not provide the "mortar" (McKenna 2021) to strengthen communication and mutual understanding among Catholics, but it may shed some light on Satan's question in Milton's Paradise Lost about why God would favor "talking monkeys" over angels. For this case, it may have to do with the diverse ways humans create meaning and different communities within sacred and profane spaces, such as social media-not unlike the "Remixed"-using different languages and modalities in a globalized world, despite converging and diverging forces that may create more despair than joy, making the world feel godless.
Burton, Tara Isabella. 2020. Strange Rites. Public Affairs: New York.
McKenna, C. 2021. An invisible mortar. The essential role of speech acts within tri-segregated moviegoing. AILA Review. 34(1), 102–121.
Taylor, Charles. 1996. A Catholic Modernity? Marianist Award Lectures. 10. 7-37.
