Charles Taylor's framework for understanding the advent of a "secular age" in the North Atlantic world offers a useful first…
Charles Taylor
Embedded religion in Asia
The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor's second secularity, a decline…
Discerning the religious spirit of secular states in Asia
In his monumental book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor distinguishes three meanings of secularism, as it refers to the "North Atlantic…
Akbar Ganji in conversation with Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor: If the human relation to religion and to God is not as shallow as the mainstream theory thinks,…
Heraclitean spirituality: divine conflict
From the vertiginous summit of his virtue, and against all evidence to the contrary, Heraclitus informs us that "it is…
Heraclitean spirituality: ephemeral selves
"That it cannot break time and time's greed---that is the will's loneliest misery." Thus spoke Zarathustra. To try to escape…
Naive and reflective faiths
It was difficult all along to conceive of religion (its ritual practices, mystical unions, or attractions and immersions of any…
The “option” of unbelief
Charles Taylor suggests in A Secular Age that the "default option" in modernity is "unbelief" or "exclusivist humanism," both of…
Immanent spirituality
A worthy touchstone to arbitrate between worldviews immanent and transcendent is the désir d'éternité, the "desire to gather together the…
Among the unbelievers
Gregor McLennan reviews Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, in the New Left Review (subscription required).