A Secular Age

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 09/01/2007
ISBN: 9780674026766
Pages: 874
Weight: 2.90lbs
Size: 9.32h x 6.64w x 2.08d
Award: Christianity Today Book Award - Winner

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 06/11/2007 pg. 54
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2007 pg. 597
Library Journal 08/01/2007 pg. 94
Kirkus Best Books 10/01/2007 pg. 1
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/05/2007 pg. 34
Christian Century 12/11/2008 pg. 22
New York Times Book Review 12/16/2007 pg. 15
New York Times Book Review 12/23/2007 pg. 14
Choice 02/01/2008 pg. 1177
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/07/2008 pg. 11
Christian Century 12/16/2008 pg. 32
Christian Century 05/03/2011 pg. 40