Begin Your Journey With Ein Säkulares Zeitalter Outlined By Charles Taylor Issued As Digital Format

massive slog, and repetitive at some points, but incredibly insightful, This purports to be an account of what it means to believe in god today versus, say, the year, It's a hodgepodge of philosophy amp history, almostpages, at times sloppy and meandering, Certain chapters almost seem like book reports on whatever the author happened to be reading,

Charles Taylor is himself a brilliant philosopher and practicing Catholic, Before reading this book I knew him through his remarkable essays on Heidegger, MerleauPonty, and Gadamer in the Cambridge companions to all three he arguably steals the show surely one of their greatest heirs and interpreters writing in English.
Part of what intrigued me, then, was discovering what reasons an extremely intelligent person has for believing in god,

In this respect the book was a bit of a disappointment, Taylor flatly dismisses any logical arguments for god as beside the point, The most he can offer is a 'deconstruction' of the epistemology that's supposed to undergird atheism which is well and good, but even if atheism is less certain than many of its proponents claim, god may still seem like a wildly improbable proposition to many to me, in fact.
Discussing this with a friend of mine who's a formerProtestantseminarianturnedunbeliever, my friend suggested that as a Catholic Taylor himself doesn't actually have to believe he has the convenience of having the Pope believe for him.


Incidentally I've since discovered the Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga while he doesn't have anything like Taylor's erudition, he's able to give highly compelling arguments to defend belief from the charge of being irrational.


Nonetheless, I recommend A Secular Age, It's brimming with interesting ideas, Even if the author doesn't come to any definite conclusions, he's able to draw attention to a number of fascinating modern dilemmas, Who Should Read this Book Anyone who wants to understand how the secular modern world came into existence in the centuries following,

Whats the Big Takeaway The story of secularism and modernity that people learn science and reject religion, is deficient and not grounded in reality, Taylor offers a much more nuanced story that portrays the secular world as one in which there are many live options from belief to unbelief and no option is uncontested.


And a quote How do I pick a quote from anpage book like this

How about “But the expressivist outlook takes this a stage farther.
The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this.
. . But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult”.


I read this book exactly ten years ago, I was blown away by the breadth and depth of the work, It is probably not too much to say Taylors work here completely changed how I understood what it meant to be secular and living in the modern world, Ive overheard SO MANY discussions on podcasts and at coffee shops and churches where I want to just chime in, “you should read Charles Taylor, ”

Of course, most normal people do not have the time or energy to read a mammoth book like this, Im not sure what it says about me that Ive now read it twice,

But in the last ten years, I have often wondered how much I missed in this book, Since then, I have read plenty of other books on the same subject, Further, I have seen plenty of authors interact with Taylor, I think CS Lewis said something about how great books are ones that demand rereads, Usually I only reread fiction, Yet, I feltwas the year to dive back in to Taylor, I read his other magnificent work, Sources of Self, over the summer, This one took quite a bit longer because its longer, and I work on a university campus so Ive been busier,

That said, I got so much more out of this reread, Actually, come to think of it, I wish I had underlined in a different color so I could come back in another ten years!

Taylors question is how come inbelief in God was taken for granted and today it is highly contested.
He presses back against the common “subtraction story” that we just learned science and discarded religion, Its nowhere near this simple, His definition of a secular age is where all beliefs are contested, Even we who believe the ancient doctrines of Christianity will inevitably experience them differently for we know we have choices and other “live options”, We are, as Taylor says, crosspressured, But so too are those who reject belief in God they are haunted by a lack of transcendence,

Were all secular,

The story Taylor tell of how we got there focuses on Reform, Ive seen some reviewers accuse Taylor of blaming secularism on the Reformation, This demonstrates a simple failure to get his point which is okay, its a long book and Im sure I didnt always get his point because he explicitly says the Reform movement as he is speaking of predates the Protestant Reformation.
He speaks of the decision at the Fourth Lateran Council inthat all Catholics must take communion once a year, Prior to this, the Church had settled in to two tracks towards spiritual growth a fast track for monks and other mystic types and a slower track for the rest of us.
Space was given for people to let loose Carnival and not everyone was expected to live like Jesus all the time be “radical” as we might put it today.
But the church began to desire to elevate all of culture,

Eventually though, this elevation could not be sustained, Plus, thisworldly ends came to be seen as the primary ends, There has always been a tension in Christianity between human flourishing and selfdenial Jesus healed and fed people but also called people to give it all up, The call for all people to move up ended up sort of leveling out and kind of bringing people down,

There is a lot more to the story! Taylor speaks of disenchantment which is another HUGE point, The premodern world was enchanted, filled with spirits and angels and all sorts of things, It was a cosmos full of life, Now we look out and just see a natural world, Closing off the supernatural, we live “buffered” selves in an “immanent” frame,

The great thing about Taylor is that this is not esoteric mumbojumbo, You can see the practical, real world truth, I think of communion as we nonCatholics take it, We see it as remembering which implies all that is happening is happening inside our heads, Rather than seeing power out there in the elements, bringing God into us, its just in our minds, disembodied from participating in creation the way the ancients did,

At one point, Taylor was talking of how people were questioning religion and moving away from the faith of their parents, But this is a cycle, where the next generation may move back to the faith, I had just been in a conversation with friends about “deconstruction” and “exvangelicals” and “exChristians” and realized all this has been going on for centuries, There were numerous other moments where Taylor pinpointed things that were happening and even pointed to changes that have come about in theyears since the book was published.


Overall, its a brilliant book, Its certainly work. If anyone wants encouragement, know that Taylor does write it almost as a story at least the first half or so, That said, he does meander and go off on tangents and could have made the same basic argument in/the pages, But its a feast and worth the time,


review:

Wow, Absolutely fantastic. This is certainly one of the best, most challenging, books that I have ever read, I am still turning over in my mind many of the points Taylor makes, Reading this book reminds me why I read difficult books I am sure I did not get all of it, but being stretched in reading it was a joy in itself.


Taylor basic goal is to answer why it was next to impossible not to believe in God inwhereas today it is very difficult to believe in God.
What caused this change in our culture, almost a complete reversal, in the lastyears

Many have said the answer is simple we discovered science and thus rejected religion.
You see this answer from atheists who sell a lot more books then Taylor does, people like Dawkins and Harris, While the rise

of science did play a part, Taylor convincingly argues, . . strike that, he shows historically that this explanation is way too simple, There were many reasons that led tot his change the Reformation leading to disenchantment, the rise of a discipline culture and more,

Today it is difficult to believe, though Taylor does show that any position one takes is fraught with some difficulty, We live in a world with many live options,

There is a lot more to say, though that would require me going back with a finetooth comb over my highlights, Maybe some other day Fascinating. Dense. Brilliant. Massive. Unbelievably influential. Insightful. And did I mention its superdense

A Secular Age is the ultimate "How We Got to Now" book which is my favorite genre, How did we go from thes, when it was almost impossible to NOT believe in God, to now when belief in God is completely against the grain

Id recommend reading A Secular Age paired with a couple other books that apply and explain it:

Id recommend this reading order:
How NOT to be Secular
A Secular Age
Our Secular Age

How Not To will give you the framework needed to digest Taylors massive and dense A Secular Age.
Our Secular Age will help you apply it and, especially if you are protestant, interpret it,

The most common question I get re Secular: Is this worth reading The answer: yes, because I think its worth reading "source books",

There are very few original thinkers, And even the most original thinkers are derivative, They are getting their ideas from someone,

I think one of the most helpful practices in reading is to try to read the source, the headwaters of the derivative streams,

Not only are Source books long, theyre often pretty difficult reads, But I think they're still worth the energy and time even if you only understand a/of what the author is saying, As you read the derivatives, you will begin to better understand the source,

And deeply understanding the source book will give you greater insight as you read the derivatives, Its a virtuous cycle.

AND you will become a better reader, Im not saying dont read the derivatives, We learn through repetition. It really helps to hear an author apply an idea especially helpful to read Christian authors applying secular ideas, But you will get so much more out of derivative books if you have wrestled with the source, It's hard to know how to rate this book when I'm still sorting through my thoughts and struggling to process what my takeaways are, This book has generated a lot of buzz in the past few years and contains some important thoughts, That said, I found Taylor very difficult to follow and regularly had to retrace my steps to try to understand what he was saying, That was also reflective of my inexperience reading philosophy, though, I definitely disagreed with some of his conclusions, but all in all, I'm eager to reflect more on this book in the coming days, This was quite a work to get through as evidenced by the fact that it took me nearlymonths to read, and I felt like I was reading fairly consistently through that whole time, but entirely worth the effort.
I first heard about this book maybe a decade ago, mentioned as some massive tome that others might "have read" but never as something that one would actually sit down "to read".
However, the idea stuck with me a wideranging exploration of how we came to live in a world with such a broad spectrum of belief and unbelief, and after working my way through several reading groups of early church history and modern philosophy, I finally found myself checking this out from the library.


Taylor's primary goal is to explore the reasons underpinning our current secular age, and while he provides several definitions/dimensions of secularity, he is most intrigued by what he calls "Secularity", which describes a society where the possibility for unbelief exists as opposed to worrying about churchstate relations or of practicing religious people in a society.
He interrogates the classical teaching that secularity is a natural function of learning and scientific advancement and therefore religion will naturally fade away with more time and enlightenment by carefully examining philosophic, theologic and moral threads across the millennia.
He argues that scientific developments and theories on their own did not necessarily spell the end of widespread religion and growth of secularity, but places substantial weight on the impact of Reform and how changes in thinking about religion particularly within Christianity with both the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform changed the conditions of faith and laid the possibility for Deism, then ultimately exclusive humanism and modern secularity.


This is not an easy read, I had to take notes throughout, both to keep lines of thinking straight and organize my reactions to the writing, But it is a worthwhile read for anyone who has been curious of how we got "here" with modern state of religion and secularity, and who's willing to buckle in for quite the ride.
.