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" To return to my family house is to be reminded of how my life is dependent on history: both the natural history of evolution and the social history of those who came before me. Who I can be and what I can do is not generated solely by me. My life is dependent on previous generations and on those who took care of me, with all of us in turn dependent on a history of the Earth that so easily could have been different and that might never have brought any of us into being.
Moreover, my life is historical in the sense that it is oriented toward a future that is not given. The worlds of which I am a part, the projects I sustain and that sustain me, can flourish and change in a dynamic way, but they can also break apart, atrophy, and die. The worlds that open up through my family and friends, the project that shape my work and political commitments, carry the promise of my life but also the risk that my life will be shattered or fail to make sense. In a word, both my life and the projects in which I am engaged are finite. (3-4) "
― , This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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" Religious reconciliation is [...] always deferred to an unattainable future, when we will be absolved from the finitude of life. A secular reconciliation, by contrast, recognizes that “there is nothing degrading about being alive” (as Hegel puts it in a poignant phrase). Being vulnerable to pain, loss, and death is not a fallen condition but inseparable from being someone for whom something can matter. The point is not that we should embrace pain, loss, and death. The idea of such an embrace is just another version of the religious ideal of being absolved from vulnerability. If we embraced pain we would not suffer, if we embraced loss we would not mourn, and if we embraced death we would not be anxious about our lives. Far from advocating such invulnerability, a secular reconciliation with finitude acknowledges that we must be vulnerable—we must be marked by the suffering of pain, the mourning of loss, the anxiety before death—in order to lead our lives and care about one another. Only through such an acknowledgment can we turn away from the religious promise of absolution and turn toward our time together. Only through such an acknowledgment can we understand the urgency of changing our lives. We are reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason we are not reconciled to living unworthy lives. We demand a better society and we know that it depends on us. In taking action, we are not waiting for a timeless future but grasp in practice that our time is all we have. "
― , This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
