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.
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Review This Product
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 | Review
by: emjay
This book is amazing. It is well and deeply thought out and repays long and thorough reading.
No one reading this will look at their world in the same way afterwards. It seems to come out of a lifetime of experience, but at the same time gives evidence of careful research.
It's the sort of book you go back to again and again and get something different out of it each time you read it.
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