Post-modern thoughts

Here, too, is an echo of our own times. The combination of a modernized social fabric and the Enlightenment ideology that took root in it until relatively recently produced the autonomous self. This is the self that is not subject to outside authority and into which all reality has been contracted. The result is a radicalized individualism with a deeply privatized outlook and a mood that is insistently therapeutic. All of this has produced soil throughout society that positively invites the new spirituality. It seems normal and natural. That is why it is as difficult for the church to contest today as was gnosticism in the early centuries.