Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago…
Buffered and porous selves
Charles Taylor
Psychoanalysis as spirituality
What are our moral and spiritual sources? In his magnificent and magnanimous recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor investigates…
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…
Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics
Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im's…
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 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.…
The burden of the great divide
With the prevalence of voices casting doubts and aspersions on the so-called secularization thesis, we might imagine that the familiar…
Going beyond
One of the main arguments of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is that people, at least modern secular Westerners, have…
A case of heteronomous thinking
As a story, A Secular Age rivals Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (which curiously it ignores) and…
Framing the middle
From the opening pages, my historical antennae quickly began to quiver. Taylor’s book works in a space far removed from…