How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles TaylorHow (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. |
Contents
Contesting the Secularization2 Thesis | 79 |
How Not to Live in a Secular | 92 |
Conversions | 132 |
Glossary | 140 |
Name Index | 144 |
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Common terms and phrases
affirm ancien régime anthropocentric apologetic argument atheists Barnes Barnes’s becomes believe buffered Cambridge can’t Catholic Charles Taylor Christendom Christianity church consider construal contested conversion cosmic cosmos critique cross-pressured culture CWSs David Foster Wallace deism disenchantment doesn’t emergence enchanted epistemology eternal ethical evil excarnation exclusive humanism exclusive humanists existential faith feel fragilization God’s going Harvard University Harvard University Press haunted human flourishing Ian McEwan imagine immanent frame immanentist immanentization inhabit kind live malaise meaning modern moral order move mundane mutual benefit narrative nature notion nova effect offer ofthe one’s option ourselves Pelagianism perspective precisely premodern pressure question reality recognize Reform religion religious response secular age seems sense shift significance social imaginary society sort space spin spiritual stance subtraction stories Taylor describes Taylor notes Taylor suggests Taylor’s account tension there’s things tion transcendence trying unbelief understanding unthought Varieties ofSecularism Walker Percy what’s