Martyn Percy

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.

This book offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as the spiritual arm of the imperial project. English Anglicanism has cast itself as the lead character in its own ''serious fiction''--the main religious player in a drama of Church and Empire.Yet, in collusion with colonialism, it is now trapped by historical amnesia. Martyn Percy examines the English interests concealed in appeals to Britishness, showing how slavery, exploitation, classism and racism upheld elitist and hierarchical worldviews that bolstered both Empire and Church. By viewing the rest of the world as lesser, both institutions have declined in global standing, now reduced to minor national players on the world stage.Religious, social and political imperialism thrived on deprecating others, but those once marginalised have fought for equality and independence. Today, the worldwide Anglican Communion faces a new era of moral reckoning.