02.25.09
Taylor’s A Secular Age
Naked Strong Evaluation
By Andrew Koppelman
A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
Harvard University Press, 2007 874 pp $39.95
RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights—a commitment that does not follow from atheism as such.
James said,
February 25, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I’m not trying to do justice to your book, but one gets a sense after reading it that neither side really understands the meaning of “secularism.” Taylor is just as confused as the Darwinists.
nemo said,
February 25, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Did you mean WHEE?
The issue of secularism, as I approach it from several angles, is ironically seen in its verbal history, saeculum, age period.
The rise of the modern produced a ‘new age’, and, like the Axial Age, religions pass away as new religions, indeed ‘secularism’, come into existence.
I will write this up as a post soon.
Darwiniana » A secular age, and the eonic effect said,
February 25, 2009 at 5:55 pm
[...] Comment on Taylor’s A Secular Age James said, February 25, 2009 at 2:41 pm · I’m not trying to do justice to your book, but one gets a sense after reading it that neither side really understands the meaning of “secularism.” Taylor is just as confused as the Darwinists. [...]