What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.
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Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Landmark portrait of modernity:
An exhaustive, very learned string of reviews on Taylor's study can be found at "The Immanent Frame" ([...]), a blog maintained by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). After all that has been said, I will only add that Taylor's book is work of synthetic and imaginative genius. It offers very comprehensive insight into the condition and history of modernity without subscribing to a unilinear, "subtractionist" notion of secularization. This book will be permanently useful in many disciplines. It... more info
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If you'd like to see more of where Taylor is coming from in this book, check out his interview over at The Other Journal. It's a great read and is specifically relating to this book. [..]
Can't review because not yet received:
I'd love to review this item, but I've not yet received it, though Amazon promised it by now. What's the holdup? Robin
A great title for a poor book:
This is a wonderful 200 page book. The problem is that it takes Taylor many more hundreds of pages of repetition to finish it. I normally read a couple of books each week, but i had to put this down many times over several months to get to the end. There are some brilliant observations in this haystack, like needles, but you are so exhausted in reading the same observations so many times that it becomes a tiresome book.
I can see why there was no editor for this book since a real editor would have... more info
