A Secular Age

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who has written extensively on the interplay between the religious and secular attitudes towards life. His recent book, "A Secular Age" explores this relationship in great and thoughtful detail from both a historical and a deeply personal perspective. The book is based in part on the Gifford Lectures that Taylor delivered in Edinburgh in 1997. (William James, a philosopher Taylor admires, also delivered a set of Gifford Lectures which became "The Varieties of Religious Experience".) But the book was expanded greatly from Taylor's Gifford lectures, and he aptly advises the reader "not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a series of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other,, and offer a context of relevance for each other." (Preface) Taylor's book received the 2007 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize is awarded "for progress toward research or discovery about spiritual realities." It carries with it the largest cash award of any major prize or honor.A good deal of Taylor's book is devoted to understanding the nature of secularism and the different contexts in which the word "secularism" is used. For the larger part of the book, Taylor describes a "secular age" as an age in which unbelief in God or in Transcendent reality has become a live option to many people. He describes our age as such a "secular age" especially among academics and other intellectuals. He wants to give an account of how secularism developed, of its strengths and weaknesses, and of its current significance.Taylor's book is written on a personal, historical, and contemporary level. Taylor is a believing contemporary Catholic, and much of his treatment of religious belief reflects his own Catholic/Christian commitments. At times, I thought that Taylor's description of the religious life (necessary to his consideration of secularism) was focused too much in the nature of specifically Christian beliefs, such as the Incarnation and the Atonement, which would be of little significance to non-Christian practitioners of religion, such as Jews, Buddhists, or Zoroastrians. Taylor is, in fact, fully aware of the diversity among religious traditions, but his discussion of the religious outlook still at times tilts greatly towards Christianity. The advantage of Taylor's approach (in emphasizing his own religious commitment)is that it gives the book a sense of immediacy and lived experience. The key difference between secularism and religion for Taylor is that the former tends to see human good and human flourishing as focused solely in this world, in, for example, a happy family, a rewarding career, and service to others, while the religious outlook insists that these goods, while precious are not enough. The religious outlook is Transcendent and sees the primary good in life as beyond all individualized, this-worldly human goods.From a historical perspective, Taylor tries to reject what he calls the "subtraction story". This story sees secularism as resulting purely from the discoveries of science -- such as Darwin's evolution -- taking away assumptions basic to religion leaving a secular, nonreligious world view by default. He offers learned discussions of the medieval period, the reformation and the Enlightenment, of Romanticism and Victorianism as leading to the development of secularism but to new forms of religious awareness as well. The "subtraction story" for Taylor is a gross oversimplification. Secularism, and the religious responses to it, has a complex, convoluted history with many twists and turns. The impetus for both views, Taylor argues is predominantly ethical -- developing views on what is important for human life -- rather than merely epistemological.Taylor's approach seems to me greatly influenced by Hegel. He offers a type of dialectic in which one type of religious belief leads to a resulting series of secularist or religious responses which in turn result in other further variants and responses. In spite of his own religious commitments, he acknoledges, and celebrates, the diversity of options people have today towards both secularism and religion. The book is also deeply influenced by Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) in its emphasis on the unstated and unexamined views towards being in the world that, Taylor finds, underlie both religion and secularism.I found the best portions of the book were those that specifically adressed modern life, as Taylor asseses the importance of an "expressivist" culture, which emphasizes personal fulfillment especially as it involves sexuality, of gender issues and feminism, of this-worldy service to others, and of fanaticism and violence upon issues of secularism and religion. Taylor emphasizes that people today tend to be fluid in their beliefs and to move more frequently than did people in other times between religions, between alternative spiritualities, and, indeed between secularism and religion. He attributes this to the plethora of options in a fragmented age and to a search for meaning among many people that did not seem as pressing in earlier times. Peggy Lee's song "Is that all there is?" is a theme that runs through a great deal of Taylor's book.Taylor has written a difficult, challenging work that is unlikely to change many people's opinions about their own secularism or religion but that may lead to an increased understanding of individuals for their own views and for those of others. This book is not for the casual reader. It will appeal to those who have wrestled for themeselves with questions of spirituality and secularism.Robin Friedman

Some scholars get more concise as they grow older; some seem to feel the obsessive need to summarize once more everything they believe and have studied. Taylor clearly belongs to the second group. On 776 pages he makes the reader drink from a fire hose. What makes this experience so frustrating and often outright painful is that his writing is so atrocious, obtuse, endlessly repetitious, and often outright ungrammatical. Other reviewers have provided the evidence I need not repeat here. Why didn't he find a good editor? What a pity because in this flood of words he has some interesting things to say. In the first two chapters--which I, in contrast to some other reviewers, found particularly fascinating--he traces the seeds of secularism to reform movements in the church, starting as early as the 13th century. In the third chapter, he goes even one step further and believes that Christianity from its very beginning has had the potential to lead to secularism, for the Catholic Taylor clearly an unfortunate and unintended consequence. (Even the parable of the Good Samaritan is cited as a potential seed for a future secularism!!) After this surprising opening, Taylor follows a more traditional trajectory, though he emphasizes repeatedly that his analyses break new ground: From the Reformation (Max Weber already saw its crucial importance in this context), to the Enlightenment, Deism, the Romantic revolt and its various forms of individualism etc. He then returns to religion and its future in a secular world "because in a way this whole book is an attempt to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith" (p. 510). Here he wants to show that this secular age might not be as irreligious as many believe, and he ends with the assurance that "we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching whose outcome no one can foresee" (535). Well, an appropriate conclusion for an already long book. But, oh no! There follow another 240 pages (was this to be another book?) of renewed analyses of the secular age, unavoidably repeating many of the arguments and some of the evidence already displayed as he told the story of the rise of secularism. Taylor finally ends with religious conversion experiences in an our secular age, a chapter that could have fit will with his earlier section on religion in the secular age. Let me emphasize that I am not unsympathetic to the general direction of Taylor's research and findings. The problem is that he simply attempts too much and rushes through his many, many analyses of past and present at a breathtaking, bewildering speed. The impression quickly arises that he mostly talks to himself in a sort of intellectual telegram style, and one hopes that at least he would know all the intermediate links that he had to leave out in his permanent rush to new insights. Repeating these rushed, truncated arguments does not make them more persuasive. In the end one is left with the uncomfortable impression that this comprehensive study forces the reader to take on trust an overwhelming, rarely adequately explained set of premises, evidences, and conclusions. Less could have been more.

Um dos melhores livros das últimas décadas.Fundamental para se estudar nossa visão de mundo hoje: basante secular (e pouco ou nada espiritual/religiosa).

When 'A Secular Age' arrived I was surprised at the vastness of the book. At the moment I'm only halfway through the work but have found it full of insights that before I hadn't given much thought to; and a clever historyencapsulating its foundational causes. However what rivets me is the, almost poetic language that CharlesTaylor uses to convey his ruminations . Excellent.

Una obra imprescindible para analizar el proceso de la secularización en las sociedades contemporáneas. La presentación del libro con pasta dura es excelente. Lástima que aún no haya edición castellana, como contrapartida es una buena ocasión para leer inglés, el lenguaje de Taylor es muy asequible.

Conoscevo già il contenuto dell'opera in quanto ho letto la versione italiana del saggio "L'età secolare"e desideravo possedere anche la versione originale. E'un testo che arricchisce la nostra visione della epoca attuale.(la nostra "Social Imaginary") e getta una luce sulle nostre radici cristiane. Per quanto riguarda la grafica la versione inglese è nettamente migliore della versione italiana. Consiglio la lettura attenta di questo illuminante testo.

interesante, explica cómo se ha ido perdiendo el sentido religioso en la sociedad actual, recomendable pero no es suficientemente profundo.