Faith in Secular Life

Draws on film, novels, popular culture, music, sport and secular buildings to show that the modern world teems with transcendence.

Draws on film, novels, popular culture, music, sport and secular buildings to show that the modern world teems with transcendence.


Faith in Secular Life finds signals of transcendence in the most unlikely places. The Very Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy 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.