Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is an inspired yet rigorously argued Wagnerian effort to analyze the distinctive anxieties of modern…
Deus absconditus and disenchantment
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
After Durkheim
I continue, as I reread it, to have the highest opinion of A Secular Age and to believe that it…
That weird strange thing
That Charles Taylor’s massive book on the malaises and predicaments of secularity could be taken by so many distinguished intellectuals…
The truth?
As many here have noted, A Secular Age is a remarkable achievement. And it marks the culmination of a life’s…
Spinoza’s immanence
My hunch is that immanence does not necessarily lead to the “exclusive humanism” of which Taylor is so critical. My…
The great separation
One should be suspicious of any argument that presents the multiple alternatives facing contemporary societies around the world today as…
A cautionary tale?
It would have been enough for Lilla to frame this book as an explanation of the genealogy of bourgeois protestant…
The missing all
Although technology may not possess a logic of its own, one would be hard pressed to deny its formative role…
Can sex be a minor form of spitting?
So what’s the problem? What’s the ethical crisis? For Taylor it is this: sexuality cannot carry the burden of the…
A Catholic Modernity?
Some readers of Sources of the Self, particularly its last few chapters, might have wondered how exactly Taylor’s indirect plea…