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A Secular Age

By Charles Taylor

(1)

| Hardcover | 9780674026766

Book Description

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 Continue

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.

1 Review

  • So far... Slow start. Don't like Taylor's style too much: Not very precise or concise. Maybe he's trying to write in a popular style and doesn't quite make it? But the book's question is intriguing even if i'm not totally sold on the validity of it: why are atheism, agnosticism, or other forms of sk ... (continue)

    So far... Slow start. Don't like Taylor's style too much: Not very precise or concise. Maybe he's trying to write in a popular style and doesn't quite make it? But the book's question is intriguing even if i'm not totally sold on the validity of it: why are atheism, agnosticism, or other forms of skepticism and disbelief mainstream choices today when they were unusual in the West 500 years ago and earlier? What happened to change the conditions of belief? Taylor connects this with what he sees as the rise of an exclusive humanism over the last 500 years ("exclusive humanism" meaning placing human beings at the center of standards of ethics and value... I think... not very clear on this yet...). He limits his enquiry to the West, but I wonder if variations of his thesis would work for East Asia?

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Book Details

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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 896 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 0674026764
  • ISBN-13: 9780674026766
  • Publisher: Belknap Press
  • Pub date: Sep 20, 2007
  • Dimensions: 24 cm x 17 cm x 5 cm Just how big is that?
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ISBN Edition List Sale Seller
9780674026766 Hardcover $42.00 $33.65 Amazon US
£29.95 £28.45 Amazon UK
$50.50 $31.82 Amazon CA
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