Secularist Humanism, Law and Religion in Ian McEwan's The Children Act
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3370260 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Camil Ungureanu (0000-0001-8419-8111, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 468 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel12070468 |
| OpenAlex | W3176217038 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
Ian McEwan's The Children Act focuses on a real-life conflict between religion and children's rights in a pluralist society. By drawing on Charles Taylor's work on religion in the "secular age", I argue that McEwan's narrative is ultimately built on secularist assumptions that devalue religious experience. McEwan's approach aims to build a bridge between literary imagination and scientific rationality: religion is, from this perspective, reducible to a "fable" and an authority structure incongruous with legal rationality and the quest for meaning in the modern-secular society. In The Children Act, art substitutes religion and its aspiration to transcendence: music in particular is a universal idiom that can overcome barriers of communication and provides "ecstatic" experiences in a godless world
Aesthetics · Art · Catharsis · Epistemology · Fable · Humanism · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Rationality · Sociology · Theology · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |