In Taylor’s brief third chapter he seeks to understand the disembedding that took place for the modern conception of “the individual” to emerge. Taylor begins with an examination of “early religion” those religious forms of the axial age that existed before the advent of the “higher religions” such as Judaism, Buddhism or Confucianism, which brought … Continue reading Chapter 3: The Great Disembedding
In this chapter, Taylor starts to describe the process by which we move from and enchanted to a disenchanted world and describes how the movement of "Reform" takes us into the modern, disciplinary society. He begins by asking how to explain the rise in the interest in nature for its own sake in the late … Continue reading Chapter 2: The Rise of the Disciplinary Society
In chapter one, Taylor sets out to show how the social imaginary of medieval society reinforced belief in God. He then describes the shifts that had to take place to make exclusive humanism a genuine option. Taylor points to three features of the medieval imaginary: The cosmos, the society and the enchanted world. First, the … Continue reading Chapter 1: The Bulwarks of Belief
In this series of blog posts, I will summarize each chapter of Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age. In the introduction of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor seeks to define key terms and outline the scope of the book. Taylor begins by exploring what it means to say that we live in a “secular” age. … Continue reading A Secular Age: Introduction
For those of you feeling intimidated by my 21 part series on A Secular Age, this shorter summary could help you get a sense of the argument Taylor is making. I've organized this shorter summary into 11 different sections and added some links to the corresponding chapter summary that each section is drawn from. At … Continue reading A Secular Age: Shorter Summary
Coffee with Kierkegaard 