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A Secular Age
By
Charles Taylor
Description
Charles Taylor is
Winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of 2007 Selection
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.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: The Work of Reform
1. The Bulwarks of
Belief
2. The Rise of the
Disciplinary Society
3. The Great
Disembedding
4. Modern Social
Imaginaries
5. The Spectre of
Idealism
Part II: The Turning Point
6. Providential
Deism
7. The Impersonal
Order
Part III: The Nova Effect
8. The Malaises of
Modernity
9. The Dark Abyss
of Time
10. The Expanding
Universe of Unbelief
11.
Nineteenth-Century Trajectories
Part IV: Narratives of
Secularization
12. The Age of
Mobilization
13. The Age of
Authenticity
14. Religion Today
Part V: Conditions of Belief
15. The Immanent
Frame
16. Cross
Pressures
17. Dilemmas 1
18. Dilemmas 2
19. Unquiet
Frontiers of Modernity
20. Conversions
Epilogue: The Many
Stories
Notes
Index
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