A Secular Age

by Charles Taylor


A friend, who is a philosopher, told me about Charles Taylor a few years ago. His thinking on communitarianism have stuck with me. Picked this up from the library recently, read the intro, and flipped around through the rest. It’s pretty dense and a bit too academic for my constitution, so I am giving up on reading the whole thing.

But, my curiosity did help me find something that stuck out:

  • In Christendom, we have moved from Naiveté where belief in God is universally the lived experience of everyone. It’s as common and un-thought of as the air itself to a life where belief in God is one of many different options.
  • Taylor defines secular as: “a condition in which our experience of and search for fullness occurs; and this is something we all share, believes and unbelievers alike.”
  • It used to be that fullness was found in life after life on Earth. Now, it is something understood and pursued through our life on Earth.

Perhaps I’ll pick the book up again some time. I don’t have the attention span for it now, I fear.


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2 responses to “A Secular Age”

  1. […] I think politics have replaced religious identity for many of us and we look to them for meaning and […]

  2. […] has secularized. I do not mean this in the culture-war sense of secular vs. religious. I mean, as Charles Taylor says, that we now seek our meaning through many different options in the pursuit of meaning and […]

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