Ungureanu, Camil2022-11-082022-11-082021Ungureanu C. Secularist humanism, law and religion in Ian McEwan’s the children act. Religions. 2021 Jun 25;12(7):468. DOI: 10.3390/rel120704682077-1444http://hdl.handle.net/10230/54754Ian 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.application/pdfeng© 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel12070468ReligionLawSecularist humanismCharles TaylorImmanent frameJehovah’s Witnessesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess