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Jan 15, 2009, 04:53AM

The Metaphysics of Bono

"Bono tells us that every moment we’re uniquely ourselves endures eternally — so in order to know how to be ourselves, to know who we truly and eternally are, we have to learn and experience the fullness of our complex inner contrasts."

No, but seriously, this is one of the better musing over Bono's NYT column:

Because Bono — to hazard a guess — wants to appropriate inaccessibly Christian values and goals for the further and higher end of bringing people – lots and lots of people — into closer concordance with something we could crudely think of being called ‘Christianity in fact’, something more closely resembling a world that wouldn’t make Jesus weep. Bono’s Christian Hegelianism is a lot like the un- or even anti-Christian Hegelianism of secular humanists who want, as Rorty puts it, to "pull up the ladders" from oogedy-boogedy land while retaining the precious earnest of values and commitments that our Judeo-Christian heritage wound up bequeathing us. Those who seek to secularize Christianity aren’t, as Charles Taylor has suggested, merely ’subtracting’ from it; they’re adding to it, even trying to ‘purify’ it of the things within the tradition of Jesus that they think make it imperfect (like Church dogma or even God the Father). Perhaps Bono, in symmetrical contrast, has been on a long quest — if I can put it this way — to Christianize secularity.

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