In this chapter, Taylor describes the cross pressures between unbelieving and believing positions in modernity. Taylor begins by restating his resistance to the standard secularization thesis; that religion cannot but decline in the conditions of modernity. Taylor thinks that this kind of account of the place of religion in modern society presupposes unbelief, and is … Continue reading Chapter 16: Cross Pressures →

In the previous chapters, Taylor has taken us through a genealogy of the emergence of our Secular Age, now, in the final few chapters, he turns to describe the experience, the “conditions of belief” of our Secular Age. He is now ready to return to the question he first asked in the introduction: “why is … Continue reading Chapter 15: The Immanent Frame →

In this chapter, Taylor zooms in on the nova effect and traces the development of new forms of unbelief in different countries. He focuses on England, America and France. Much of the ground Taylor covers in this chapter has already been laid out in broad strokes in previous chapters, and his in depth analysis of … Continue reading Chapter 11: Nineteenth Century Trajectories →

In this chapter, Taylor seeks to describe the emergence and the shape of the modern cosmic imaginary. By “cosmic imaginary” Taylor has in mind something analogous to what he refers to as the “social imaginary.” In the case of the “cosmic imaginary” it is that generally shared background understanding of the world and our place … Continue reading Chapter 9: The Dark Abyss of Time →

In this brief chapter, Taylor wants to defend himself against a possible charge of “idealism;” that his history of the transformation of the social imaginary gives undue causal power to ideas. This is contrasted with materialist explanations, which claim that material motivations (money, power, means to life) are more dominant in history than ideal motivations. … Continue reading Chapter 5: The Spectre of Idealism →

This is Taylor’s most detailed and complex chapter yet and my summery will necessarily leave a lot out. I suppose this goes for all of the Chapters I have summarized so far, reading Taylor is like drinking from a firehose. In this chapter Taylor is interested in describing the modern social imaginaries, he gives an … Continue reading Chapter 4: Modern Social Imaginaries →

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 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 →