Exploring Charles Taylor's Ideas on Secularism: A Guide to Understanding How to (or Not to) Be Secular

Anthony G: Great book to examine the effects of modern secularism in society

United Kingdom on Nov 18, 2023

Gualter Carmo Júnior: James k.a smith sums up Taylor's book very well. The language of the book is not so easy if English is not your first language, but even with that, the book is one of the most important for comprehending of a secular age

Brazil on May 29, 2022

Dennis Arve Wilkinson: Taylor is a heavyweight. His 800 page book is going to be a mountain too tall to climb for many of us, but then Smith comes along and helps guide us into Taylors high peaks. Transcendence is not dead, there has to be something more can you feel it? - this is the essence of the book, only Taylor and also Smith create a whole new language to talk about it! Have your dictionary near by.

Canada on Jan 12, 2022

Chillyfinger: Against the fashionable rhetoric of the modern atheists, Charles Taylor takes a long, leisurely and very detailed look at how Western civilization evolved. Not so long ago, there was no practical alternative to seeing the world as "magic filled". The slow development to the point of view we now take for granted took place (and had to take place) from within religion and not as a challenge to it.

What is this new point of view? Taylor calls it "immanence" - the idea that the world is as it seems to be and that we can understand what happens in the world without appeal to magic. This transition is best seen in the great thinkers of the 17th and 18th century such as Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton. These men discovered that the universe could be understood as being governed by "laws" that could be discovered by the mind of man (the "clockwork universe"), yet all of them were so deeply entrenched in the magical universe that it would not have occurred to any of them to abandon the idea of God, which was assumed by virtually everyone. Even so, there was a huge demotion of God from a magical spirit involved in virtually every aspect of experience to God as the...

Canada on Oct 11, 2016

K. Moss: I found this a delightful introduction to Charles Taylor's magnum opus, 'A Secular Age'. It was probably unlikely that I would have picked that 800-page tome up and read it without some sort of help and encouragement, which is what Jamie Smith so admirably supplies here.

That doesn't mean that 'How Not To Be Secular' is a walk in the park: if nothing else, one has to get one's head around Taylor's own lexicon, in order to understand the complexities and power of secularism...in order then to go beyond that and perceive the case for transcendence. Smith's writing is pithy, toothsome. Perhaps because he is firing off Taylor's more ponderous narrative, what we get is something that is an extraordinarily effective introduction - it leaves one wanting to then grapple with the real deal, but actually in the short term it supplies a most helpful distillate of Taylor's reasoning.

I, for one, am glad I encountered this modest little book first. It probably has some attractions for any secular thinker, beginning to come up against the boxing in of immanence, but it is peculiarly valuable for Christian pastors, teachers, leaders, seeking to understand the strengths and...

United Kingdom on Mar 27, 2016

Joseph T. Cochran: Bibliography

James K. A. Smith. How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. 161 pp. $16.00.

Category

Theology

Summary

Christians navigate a world dominated by secularism. Christendom has seen an end, but is that the final end? What do we mean by secularism? How did we get here? Do Christians embrace this environment? Combat it? How? Why? Why not? What are the implications of secularism in everyday life? How do Christians navigate a secular world?

For a pastor to ignore these questions would be foolish. He can’t just sweep the Church under a sacred rug and hide it in the secular room it occupies. But how does a pastor address these questions? Where does he start? To whom does he turn for counsel?

An excellent conversational partner is James K. A. Smith’s recent book, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. This 150-pager is an accessible commentary of Charles Taylor’s seminal work on post-modernity. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin College, distills Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age, to one-tenth its size, helping readers to interact with and process Taylor’s...

United States on Dec 30, 2014

Adam Shields: Starting last year I have been paying a lot of attention to James KA Smith (Jamie). The first book of his that came across my radar screen was Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. (I still haven’t actually read that one, it is on my list for this summer.)

But I did read Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. And it really did fundamentally change my perspective on liturgy and worship. Since then I regularly read Smith’s editorials (he is the editor of Comment magazine) and I have slowly been reading some of his other books.

How (Not) to Be Secular is the type of book I wish were more popular. For important ideas to really take hold, we need good authors to popularize those important ideas into formats that a general public can understand. Charles Taylor’s A Secular age is a massive and important book, but at 900 pages it is too long (and too dense) for most readers. (And more than a few people have suggested Taylor is not the most readable author.) So Jamie Smith has put together a 148 page companion that covers the basics of the argument and includes relevant contemporary examples.

The basic idea of A Secular Age is to...

United States on May 27, 2014