Social Science Research Council

Seen with a genealogical eye, Youth Without Youth speaks to the sheer danger of the sacred as the robust object of mystical longing. But whereas Eliade’s reactionary technophobia limited his appreciation for how the “countless machines mass-produced in industrial societies” were, themselves, constitutive of his experience of the sacred, Youth Without Youth suggests that technology has everything to do with our ability to imagine—whether in the service of embracing or rejecting—the sacred.

Although technology may not possess a logic of its own, one would be hard pressed to deny its formative role in whatever we are talking about, right now, on this blog. To what degree are the blurry contours and devastating effects of secularism bound up with technology? What role has technology played in fueling the nova effect of secularism and how has it both motivated contemporary practices of naming secularism, of typologizing its seemingly endless permutations, and simultaneously rendered it impossible for such practices to deliver on their promises?