With the prevalence of voices casting doubts and aspersions on the so-called secularization thesis, we might imagine that the familiar…
A Secular Age

This discussion of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is the first discussion on The Immanent Frame. You might want to begin by reading the first essay by Robert Bellah here.
The discussion hosted below expanded to include critical conversation about the edited volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, in 2010.
For a sub-thread regarding “Sex in a Secular Age” click here.
For background on the founding of The Immanent Frame and the decision to host sustained dialogue on “the secular,” read Jonathan VanAntwerpen’s “Introducing The Immanent Frame” here.
Varieties of secularism in a secular age
On April 4-5, the SSRC will co-sponsor a conference at Yale University on Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.…
Belief, spirituality and time
Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book on the Secular, periodically engages a constituency he calls immanent materialists. I would like…
Varieties of anti-religious imagination
The publication of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age has fostered an exceptionally vibrant intellectual debate on secularism and on the…
Psychoanalysis as spirituality
What are our moral and spiritual sources? In his magnificent and magnanimous recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor investigates…
Buffered and porous selves
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago…
The ruse of “secular humanism”
Discussions of the secular can often be peculiarly remote. Whenever secularism is imagined as unbelief, or political neutrality, or an…
Immanent spirituality
A worthy touchstone to arbitrate between worldviews immanent and transcendent is the désir d'éternité, the "desire to gather together the…
The “option” of unbelief
Charles Taylor suggests in A Secular Age that the "default option" in modernity is "unbelief" or "exclusivist humanism," both of…
Naive and reflective faiths
It was difficult all along to conceive of religion (its ritual practices, mystical unions, or attractions and immersions of any…