"To God we have become unaccustomed; of God we have become unaccustomed to speak, even to think, especially to write. If we slip and find ourselves thinking, speaking, or even writing of God, it seems embarrassing, horribly embarrassing - even when our inquiry is critical. All of this God stuff was supposed to have been over a long time ago. When someone ventures a word otherwise, the page tends to become a confessional without walls where our most intimate thoughts and unthoughts stand revealed for all to see and hear. Faced with the prospect of such exposure, we grow modest and withdraw. Devising strategies of avoidance in an effort not to think and not say what nonetheless we cannot not think and cannot not say, we turn to history, politics, economics, literature, art. If it is no longer professionally and socially acceptable to speak of God, perhaps we can continue to think about what really matters by examining other forms of cultural expression. Thus, critics repeat - usually without realizing or wanting to realize what they are doing - the nineteenth century gesture of translating theology into philosophy and art. Why do we still search, still probe, still question? What calls us to respond? What disrupts the present? Unless our work is 'academic' in the worst sense of the word, something else haunts the search that is our research. What is this 'something else' and why will it give us no rest?
Mark C Taylor About Religion (1999) p.30-1
