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A Secular Age
List Price: $39.95Our Price: $26.37 You Save: $13.58 (34%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 211.6
EAN: 9780674026766
ISBN: 0674026764
Label: Belknap Press
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 896
Publication Date: September 20, 2007
Publisher: Belknap Press
Studio: Belknap Press
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Editorial Review: 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.
(20070909)
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 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
Rating:  - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - In depth reflection
A work for those interested in pondering precedents that seem to now demand a second look, a more psychological reflection. There is however a slight lack of objectivity and a very slight nostagia comes through.
Rating: - Magisterial, if flawed
As someone who spends much of my time as an undergraduate teacher of theology and church-based adult educator, I regularly run up against what Taylor calls the "subtraction theory" of why secularism has largely replaced Christian faith in the Western world as the default starting point for educated people. Taylor's painstaking, detailed journey through the past five hundred years shows the constructed nature of this implicit "common sense" and then thoroughly demolishes it. Anyone who has sought to engage ... Read More
Rating: - Extraordinarily demanding, but rewarding
Charles Taylor has written one of the most rewarding and demanding books I have ever read. He describes the changing conditions of belief in Latin Christendom over the last 500 years. He explains in rich detail the move from an enchanted, hierarchical world in which time was not linear and unbelief was not an option, to our present modern era, in which time is linear, the natural is separate from the supernatural, society is organized in a largely horizontal manner, and the choices of belief/unbelief are ... Read More
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