A Secular Age
The Belknap Press (Verlag)
978-0-674-98691-6 (ISBN)
- 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
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.
Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University.
Preface
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
"One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society."
-The Economist
"Taylor takes on the broad phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity...[A] voluminous, impressively researched and often fascinating social and intellectual history."
-Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times
"A Secular Age is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition."
-John Patrick Diggins, New York Times Book Review
"A culminating dispatch from the philosophical frontlines. It is at once encyclopedic and incisive, a sweeping overview that is no less analytically rigorous for its breadth."
-Steven Hayward, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[A] thumping great volume."
-Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian
"Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A Secular Age is such a book."
-Edward Skidelsky, Daily Telegraph
"It is refreshing to read an inquiry into the condition of religion that is exploratory in its approach."
-John Gray, Harper's
"A Secular Age represents a singular achievement."
-Christopher J. Insole, Times Literary Supplement
"A determinedly brilliant new book."
-London Review of Books
| Erscheinungsdatum | 27.08.2018 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Cambridge, Mass. |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 162 x 235 mm |
| Gewicht | 1134 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-674-98691-1 / 0674986911 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-674-98691-6 / 9780674986916 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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