How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls your hitchhiker's guide to the present -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times.

Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers.

Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who we are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: 05/01/2014
ISBN: 9780802867612
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d
Award: Christianity Today Book Award - Winner

Review Citations: CBA Retailers 04/01/2014 pg. 32
Christianity Today 06/01/2014 pg. 74
Books & Culture 09/01/2014 pg. 17
Choice 11/01/2014 pg. 466
Christian Century 06/24/2015 pg. 42
Christianity Today 03/01/2016 pg. 53