From yet another review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age:
But religion itself, he argues, was heavily responsible for the predicament in which it finds itself, by throwing aside the deeper satisfactions of mystery and ritual experienced within corporate worship in favor of a relentless emphasis on the personal holiness and discipline of increasingly buffered identities, operating individualistically and instrumentally in a desacralized world. Given such misturnings, it was inevitable that we would eventually find ourselves living inside the same immanent frame, the home address of secularism. The chief remaining difference is between those who wish to understand that condition as being final and closed, and those who still contend that it can be open to transcendent experience.
So where does Charles Taylor, an avowed Catholic and an exceptionally fair-minded philosopher with a wide range of sympathies, stand in all this? His heart seems to be most fully drawn to something he calls “the Jamesean open space,” a condition of exhilarated ambivalence at the “mid-point of the cross-pressures that define our culture,” the place “where you can feel the winds pulling you now to belief, now to unbelief,” and where you can feel fully the force of both sides of the problem. Taylor is far too modest to claim to have achieved anything like this kind of comprehensive suspension, but he leaves little doubt that he regards it as a very high and enlightened state, one to which one’s aspirations could be worthily attached.
Read the full review here.
And: follow the ongoing discussion of A Secular Age at The Immanent Frame.
Jonathan VanAntwerpen is program director for theology at the Henry Luce Foundation. Originally trained as a philosopher, he received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-editor of a series of books on secularism, religion, and public life, including Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Post-Secular in Question (NYU Press, 2012), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). VanAntwerpen was the founding director of the SSRC's program on religion and the public sphere, and in 2007 he worked with others to launch The Immanent Frame, serving for several years as editor-in-chief.
