Hütter on Christianity as the religious aspect of modernity

"modern Christianity . . . has increasingly defined itself by way of the project of modernity and its characteristic hopes, in short, has come to see itself almost exclusively as the religious aspect of modernity and consequently has become oblivious and even resentful of the faith that comes from the apostles."

Reinhard Hütter, "'In hope he believed against hope' (Rom 4:18):  faith and hope, two Pauline motifs as interpreted by Aquinas:  a re-lecture of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical letter Spe salvi," Nova et vetera:  the English edition of the international theological journal 7, no. 4 (Fall 2009):  841 (839-867).  The "characteristic hopes" of modernity are, at best, hopes in the lower case:  "the hope against which Abraham believes in [H]ope is the kind of ordinary hope we can find in all human beings to a smaller or lesser degree" (855, italics mine; Hütter cites fruitfully Aquinas (n. 26) and Chrysostom (n. 27) on "Christian hope in contrast to what we might want to call 'ordinary hope'").