A Secular Age
I started reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age last week and hope to blog about it from time to time. Charles Taylor is a philosopher, a Roman Catholic, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He won the 2007 Templeton Prize for this book.
A colleague of mine who has been reading it recommended it to me. I was impressed by the endorsements on the back cover. Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, Alisdair MacIntyre, and author of After Virtue wrote, "Taylor's book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it." Robert Wuthnow, a first-rate sociologist at Princeton University and author of many books including Habits of the Heart wrote, "This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I have long admired Taylor. Yet I think this is his breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism."
This book is not for the faint of heart: it is 776 pages and not an easy read. However, I am over 100 pages into it and have found it fascinating, enlightening, challenging and well worth the effort. His introduction begins: "What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do: I mean the "we" who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world--although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the judgment of secularity seems hard to resist when we compare these societies with anything else in human history: that is, with almost all other contemporary societies...on the one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or otherwise, on the other" (1). Taylor then addresses the question of the meaning of the changes that have occurred in Western civilization in its journey toward secularism: transforming from a society where it is almost impossible not to believe in God to one in which faith in God is only one choice among a variety of others.
A colleague of mine who has been reading it recommended it to me. I was impressed by the endorsements on the back cover. Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, Alisdair MacIntyre, and author of After Virtue wrote, "Taylor's book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it." Robert Wuthnow, a first-rate sociologist at Princeton University and author of many books including Habits of the Heart wrote, "This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I have long admired Taylor. Yet I think this is his breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism."
This book is not for the faint of heart: it is 776 pages and not an easy read. However, I am over 100 pages into it and have found it fascinating, enlightening, challenging and well worth the effort. His introduction begins: "What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do: I mean the "we" who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world--although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the judgment of secularity seems hard to resist when we compare these societies with anything else in human history: that is, with almost all other contemporary societies...on the one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or otherwise, on the other" (1). Taylor then addresses the question of the meaning of the changes that have occurred in Western civilization in its journey toward secularism: transforming from a society where it is almost impossible not to believe in God to one in which faith in God is only one choice among a variety of others.
posted by UCC Medfield at 9:06 AM
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