How (Not) to Be Secular
Subtitle: reading Charles Taylor
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Grand Rapids, MI
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780802867612
Description: This book is a smart, intelligent guide to navigating today's culture. How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present." It is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. - Publisher.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : Our cross-pressured present : inhabiting a secular age; title: Reforming belief : the secular as modern accomplishment; title: The religious path to exclusive humanism : from deism to atheism; title: The malaise of immanence : the "feel" of a secular age; title: Contesting the secularization thesis; title: How (not) to live in a secular age; title: Conclusion : Conversions; title: Glossary