by Charles Taylor
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2007.
After the great response to my post on secularism as a belief system, I though to continue the reflection on secularism by presenting Charles Taylor’s masterpiece, A Secular Age. Charles Taylor, professor of philosophy at McGill University in Canada, is widely regarded as one of the today’s foremost philosophers and intellectual historians. A Secular Age is widely regarded as his magnum opus, received universally as a landmark volume.
In A Secular Age, Taylor both examines the constituting elements of secular society and narrates the intellectual history of its development. His main question is to understand how Western society transformed from a society structured around the belief in God, to one in which religious belief was one among many options, and then to understand the nature of this secular world view. Taylor is particularly concerned with the closed and predominately anti-religious structures that seek to dominate the pluralism opened by secularism. Taylor, himself a Catholic, argues for the authenticity and inevitability of the experience of transcendence, and seeks to positively revise our understanding of the role of religion in modern society.
This is the definitive intellectual history of secularism, and particularly relevant for the intellectual challenges facing Bahá’ís and their friends in the midst of the Plan.
Outlines adequate for those not interested in digging through Taylor’s 800 page argument in A Secular Age can be found on Wikipedia, the New York Times, and here.
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