A Secular Age - Softcover

Taylor, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674986911 ISBN 13: 9780674986916

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2018

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Tablet Best Book of the Year
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award

“One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society.” ―The Economist

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.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674986911
• ISBN 13: 9780674986916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 896