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This book is a smart, intelligent guide to navigating today's culture. How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present." It is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. - Publisher.… (more)
User reviews
Waypoints for navigating out of the Sargasso sea of late modernism. Welcome!
I was quite impressed by the historical panorama that Taylor sketches of how we have ended up in our secular age, mainly through a combination of the unintended effects of the Reformation, the penchant for the precise observation of nature (naturalism), and the tendency towards nominalism, which dates from the Middle Ages, i.e. the realization that words do not coincide with things. For me as a historian, Taylor uses a very rough brush, but the fact that he continually emphasizes the contingency of the process - in Smith's words a “zigzag account of causal complexity” - made quite an impression. I'll definitely go back to that later.
I must admit that the subsequent description of exactly where we are in the secular era and how we (can) deal with the demons of that era was much more difficult. Taylor does not shy away from detours in his reasoning and regularly introduces new concepts and horizons of insight. It now seems to me that his principal goal was to critique the simplistic contemporary view that the secular, that is to say the exclusive humanistic, view is the only possible realistic view of things, and I can agree with that. Smith emphasizes that Taylor cannot (and does not hide) his Catholic background in his analyzes of possible ways to deal with the ghosts of the secular age, and also that was very recognizable. But I felt that Smith's introduction in this second part remained a little more on the surface, and therefore lacked convincing power. I guess I will have to start that “A Secular Age” myself at some point, but it won't be right away.