This Life ― Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

A profound, original, and accessible book that argues that a faith not in God or eternal life, but in the finite, temporal life we lead here on earth is one that gives that life far greater depth of meaning. A manifesto for a truly secular faith that speaks eloquently to both believers and agnostics alike.

The philosopher and critic Martin Hägglund believes that we need a new way of thinking about faith. In contrast to the traditional religious faith in eternity, he proposes a secular faith in the value of living in time. He argues that the concept of an eternal heaven actually renders our mortal life meaningless since it assumes that our ultimate aims should be to escape it. Engaging writers and thinkers as diverse as C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Martin Luther, and even Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hägglund provides not only a critique of religious ideals, but also a positive, alternative understanding of the beliefs and values that can motivate us to live lives of meaning in the here and now.

MARTIN HÄGGLUND is a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he was a Junior Fellow (2009–2012). He is the author of three highly acclaimed books. In his native Sweden, he published his first book, Chronophobia (2002), at the age of twenty-five and was awarded the Swedish Academy's Grez Prize. His first book in English, Radical Atheism (2008), was the subject of a conference at Cornell University, a colloquium at Oxford University, and a 250-page special issue of The New Centennial Review, entitled Living On: Of Martin Hägglund. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012) was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a "revolutionary" achievement.