A Secular Age by CHARLES TAYLOR - September 2007

Belknap Press, September 2007. Hardcover. New. When we moderns believe in God, it is reflectively, not reflexively. Perhaps Charles Taylor's entire historical and philosophical interrogation of our current habits of thinking and being comes down to that. Such a reduction is useful in navigating what must be one of the most important contributions to the definition of 'the secular,' enormous both in bulk and erudition. Having described the nature of the person in his seminal <i>Sources of the Self</i>, Taylor now seeks to understand the person-in-the-world as we know it: 'How did we move from a condition where.people lived naively within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances? This is the transformation that I want to describe, and perhaps also (very partially) explain.This will not be easy to do.' Certainly not; but his final qualification is belied by the conversational tone of his prose, the ease with which he draws one thinker or intellectual movement after another into relation with a guiding quest to describe the nature of belief and unbelief, incidentally giving the reader a sort of spiritual history of Western civilization. What amounts to a fine summary of this book is offered by Taylor himself: 'Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries.What this fragmentary and difficult conversation points towards is the Communion of Saints.a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries towards God.' That a host of unbelievers as well as believers occupy this conversation indicates Taylor's attention to both doubt and sanctity. 874 pp.