Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has been extensively discussed, criticized, and worked on. This volume, by contrast, explores ways of working with Taylor's book, especially its potentials and limits for individual research projects. Due to its wide reception, it has initiated a truly interdisciplinary object of study; with essays drawn from various research fields, this volume fosters substantial conversation across disciplines.

Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has been extensively discussed, criticized, and worked on. This volume, by contrast, explores ways of working with Taylor's book, especially its potentials and limits for individual research projects. Due to its wide reception, it has initiated a truly interdisciplinary object of study; with essays drawn from various research fields, this volume fosters substantial conversation across disciplines.

In Great Britain during the Romantic period, governmental and social structures were becoming more secular; religion was privatized and depoliticized. But although the discretionary nature of religious practice permitted spiritual freedom and social differentiation, secular arrangements produced new anxieties. "Unquiet Things" investigates the social and political disorders that arise within modern secular cultures, and their expression in works by Jane Austen, Horace Walpole, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley among others.Emphasizing secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, "Unquiet Things" demonstrates that literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity. Colin Jager places Romantic-era writers within the context of a longer series of transformations begun in the Reformation, and identifies three ways in which romanticism and secularism interact: the melancholic mood brought on by movements of reform, the minoritizing capacity of literature to measure the disturbances produced by new arrangements of state power, and a prospective romantic thinking Jager calls "after the secular." The poems, novels, and letters of the romantic period reveal uneasy traces of the spiritual past, haunted by elements that trouble secular politics; at the same time, they imagine new and more equitable possibilities for the future. In the twenty-first century, Jager contends, we are still living within the terms of the romantic response to secularism, when literature and philosophy first took account of the consequences of modernity.

The Book of God is a penetrating study of the argument from design as it emerged and circulated in the romantic era. This argument holds that the intricacy and complexity of the natural world points to a divine designer and that nature is to be read as God's book. A literary and philosophical study of this idea, The Book of God revisits the familiar equation of romanticism, modernity, and secularization. Colin Jager eschews classic formulations of the thesis that societies secularize as they modernize, arguing instead that secularization is complexly interwoven with modernity rather than simply opposed to it. This revised concept of secularization reveals how arguments about God's designing intentions structure a romantic modernity that is neither progressive nor entirely secular. Tracing this understanding through diverse texts, ranging from philosophy and theology to poetry and fiction, Jager argues that the idea of design functions as both source and interlocutor for many of romanticism's most famous topics. The book concludes with current controversies over intelligent design and evolution, arguing for a historically informed approach to modernity's attempts to divide the religious from the secular. The book's chronological and thematic range will make it of interest to students of religion and of intellectual and cultural history, as well as literary scholars.