Secular influences in our life

I grew up alongside the television. I don't mean sitting next to it. We were born around the same time and grew up together. I can remember, as a child of three or four, my mother polishing the wooden console that housed our first TV. I sat on my dad's lap, the both of us singing along to the tunes on the Hit Parade. As I got older and television developed, dramas were broadcast; dramas portraying problems and conflicts between people. I can remember thinking to myself how this fantastic device gave me amazing insights into human relationships. I viewed people's lives and situations that I never would have been exposed to in my day to day life. I thought it was wonderful and good, a window into the human psyche. Of course, at my age I didn't know what a psyche was. But, through the viewing of television you were provided a moral compass: some things people did were good and some were bad. 
These memories were evoked by an article in First Things. Shalom Carmy speaks specifically to literature, but, literature is only one secular influence from which we obtain the values we live by. In fact, it could be argued that video media is even more influential in exposing the human condition and our responses to it.
Following is a portion of his article. I could not get a link to the full article. If you would like to have a copy please indicate your desire in a comment. I'd be glad to send you a copy.



On Literature and the Life of Torah

Unexpected insights into the challenges of living faithfully from the novels of Colm Tóibín.

Shalom Carmy 

Some Orthodox Jews are prone to claim that insights provided by the liberal arts are superfluous for those properly attuned to Torah. The significance of the human being, and the significance of choice, is essential to religious wholesomeness, but when the unique value of the individual and human responsibility is threatened by secular culture, why fight fire with fire by reading literature to liberate us from secularism when all that is needed is simply to enhance our concentration on Torah? Christians have cognate calls to set aside secular literature for the sake of redoubled emphasis on the Bible and the life of practical service. This confidence in divinely provided resources for realizing our true humanity is understandable, and in many circumstances commendable, but taken alone it underestimates the complexities of our human condition.

However ardent our outward professions, we cannot uphold the abiding conviction that God cares about our prosaic existence if we find that existence insignificant ourselves. “Nothing really matters; nothing really matters to me”: The words with which Queen ends “Bohemian Rhapsody” express a haunting contemporary sentiment, one that often makes the life-defining endeavors of religious devotion and moral discipline seem pointless.

Moreover, to fully understand other people is to consider that their existence, like ours, matters to God and pursues a unique and mysterious trajectory. Take away the challenge of experiencing other human beings this way and social engineering is possible, but not love or respect for others.

Further, the prevalent winds of culture today are inimical to the religious orientation we strive to embrace. A secular view of what it means to be human predominates. Whether we choose or not, our encounter with this often alien and hostile culture is the arena in which we must formulate for ourselves a stubborn and persistent religious sense of what it means to be human. 

The religious person must never forget that as we are now is not the only way to be. This awareness—nurtured and increased by the reading of literature—requires nurturing an inner freedom of the imagination, the ability to see in rich particularity different circumstances, choices, and trajectories of life. It is a freedom we need to cultivate today if we are to stand apart from the tyranny of the present secular consensus; it is the freedom to transform ourselves into something faithful yet new, disciplined yet unprecedented; it is the freedom to realize, in our own time and place, the mysterious destiny that constitutes our dialogue with God.