A Secular Age,   ISBN:9780674026766

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I speak about the librarian product and the bookseller.
It arrived in perfect conditions without dilay.

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Good book specially because I do not share final conclusions or even some approach but it helps me to rethink some ideas... that is what I am looking for when I have a book in my hands.

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Quite a number of books have been written in recent years repudiating the classical secularization thesis of social science, which claims that as societies modernize, they become less religious. Peter Berger's THE DESCULARIZATION OF THE WORLD is a good example because forty years ago Berger was himself a proponent of the secularization thesis. So it was with some surprise that I eyed the title of Charles Taylor's A SECULAR AGE. Can this perspicacious Canadian philosopher actually be reaffirming the thesis? No. Taylor and Berger are quite similar when it comes to recognizing the futility of the modern attempt to liquidate the transcendent in the name of a progressive, exclusive humanism. The abuses of religion-- crusades, indulgences, inquisitions-- understandably motivated some to construct a world without religion, but the result-- our secular age-- is both liberating and suffocating. Exclusive humanists are committed to the proposition that whatever was beautiful in religion can be translated into humanism without loss. And that which was not beautiful will be well lost. Yes, that sunset is beautiful-- but it is just as beautiful (if not more so) when it is seen as a testament not to the glory of God but to the human spirit. But Taylor judges that this attempt to fit the transcendent into the Procrustean bed of "the immanent frame" has produced the "unquiet frontiers of modernity." "Our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief" (p. 727). But the critical distinction for Taylor is not between belief and unbelief but between transcendence and immanence. Like many religious thinkers, he recognizes that religiosity is not always accurately reflected in self-reports. Unbelievers can be more open to God than believers. His goal is the articulation of a religious sensibility which simultaneously leaves humans vulnerable to "external transcendence" (God)-- a vulnerability against which the autonomous modern self is "buffered"-- and acknowledges the goodness of ordinary human life (including sexuality)-- which religion has too often suppressed in the name of ideological purity. If we are to "get real," we can neither deny our humanity nor God. But that is not his goal in this book, in which he tries-- in the best Hegelian fashion-- to illuminate the cunning of history (i.e., explain how we wound up in a secular age). The reader who is able to follow Taylor's long (but accessible) history will be in a position to participate in the articulation of the needed sensibility.

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Becoming Children of Modernity
A Consideration of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.
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No one gets out of here alive:

Although trying to write the intellectual biography of modernity is an important, even necessary, task, ultimately, it is impossible. There is something asymptotically elusive about modernity: The depth and comprehensiveness of our definitions increase with abstractness and distance; the accuracy, nuance, and precision of our characterizations increase with narrowness and obscurity. Moreover, the more one studies secular modernity, the more it becomes apparent that it is a phenomenon not easily separable from reality itself; it is nearly as immune to exhaustive intellectual comprehension and description, nearly as impossible to escape or transcend.

This is the main thesis of Charles Taylor's recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I think it is a defensible one. Modernity is, in a very real sense, inescapable. As Taylor puts it--we are in it. In other words, there is something almost ontological about secular modernity. Even though what we are talking about is, of course, an artifact of man, not God, that is, a cultural and historical phenomenon, not a natural or supernatural one equivalent to a change in being itself (I am no Hegelian); nevertheless cultural and historical being is, at least for us, that is, for the culture-dependent rational animals that we are, the ineluctable mediator of any "pure" being that we may experience.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued persuasively, pace the Enlightenment's "view from nowhere," we never encounter reality unmediated by tradition, cultural artifacts of human language, conceptual schemes, social practices, ritual and narrative, moral norms, etc.; and though we can ultimately transcend tradition, history and culture to attain timeless truth, it is only through the cultural resources and productions that we both create and are created by, as it were, that we can do so.
Nevertheless, in light of the notorious, anti-Christian and anti-human fruits that appear to have grown solely in the soil of secular modernity, it would seem an obligation for not only Christians but also true humanists to be against it--whatever its ontological status. Should Christians not create adequately anti-modern, domestic, social, cultural, political, educational, and liturgical environments if the ones secular modernity has given threaten their salvation?

However, if secular modernity is more akin to an ubiquitous consciousness or pre-constructive theoretical and practical framework, that is, not a particular ideology or structure-of-sin, but something underlying these, then "anti-modernness" is illusory, and escape futile. Christians are indeed obliged to resist and ultimately "escape" from secular modernity, but that is because Christians are obliged ultimately to transcend all finite times and places when they become idols preventing the attainment of union with the timeless and placeless God--not because modernity is intrinsically evil.

The end of naïveté

What should we say secular modernity is then? Taylor attempts to define it, and it takes him almost eight-hundred pages of historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological, economic, political, scientific, and theological analysis to do it. It is by far the most sophisticated and erudite attempt I have ever read to define what might be, along with God, being, and the individual human person, a most indefinable reality. Out of the many trenchant and profound descriptions of modernity Taylor offers us, this one is especially helpful for our purposes:

"[T]here has been a titanic change in our western civilization. We have changed not just from a condition where most people lived "naïvely" in a construal (part Christian, part related to "spirits" of pagan origin) as simple reality, to one in which almost no one is capable of this, but all see their option as one among many. We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an "engaged" one in which we live as best we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a "disengaged" one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist. . . . The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others. . . .[A] secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of peoples."

Note that his characterization of secular modernity is eminently non-ideological and non-condemnatory; it is neither the rigid denunciation of the traditionalist, nor the insouciant glorification of the humanist. Rather, Taylor identifies secular modernity as something more akin to a radically new paradigm or consciousness shift, in itself neither moral nor immoral, true nor false, good nor evil, pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. It is not to be identified with exclusive humanism, managerial liberalism, and fascist fundamentalism, on the one hand, or the resurgence of public religiosity, the priority of liberal democracy and human rights, and the intolerance of religious intolerance, on the other. For these, according to Taylor, are only its diverse ideological interpretations and embodiments, the structures of thought and practice that have built upon and with secular modernity's peculiar consciousness and potentiality, what he calls the "immanent frame":

"We have undergone a change in our condition, involving both an alteration of the structures we live within, and our way of imaging these structures. This is something we all share, regardless of our differences in outlook. But this cannot be captured in terms of a decline and marginalization of religion. What we share is what I have been calling "the immanent frame"

Although we can think about, and thus gain some distance from, this background and structure in an abstract, philosophical manner, we cannot entirely escape and transcend it.

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Isn't it odd how theists routinely report being wracked by doubt? Consumed by doubt, never resting in their dubious faith position, never taking for granted their hidden god, etc., etc.

If they really took their doubt seriously, they would become atheists ... but that seems to be a psychological bridge too far. So they spend books salving their self image, posing as paragons of reason, and delving into the exotic positions of others (just not too far), berating those who more tersely pursue reason to its rather obvious if bitter ends, only to wind up, as do Taylor and (much more concisely, cogently, and elegantly before him) William James, back in the faith for reasons of sheer habit and comfort. "By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true"- William James, 1905,
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature