A Secular Age

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Customer Reviews:

In depth reflection [Posted on 2008-02-08]
A work for those interested in pondering precedents that seem to now demand a second look, a more psychological reflection. There is however a slight lack of objectivity and a very slight nostagia comes through.

A great title for a poor book [Posted on 2008-02-09]
This is a wonderful 200 page book. The problem is that it takes Taylor many more hundreds of pages of repetition to finish it. I normally read a couple of books each week, but i had to put this down many times over several months to get to the end. There are some brilliant observations in this haystack, like needles, but you are so exhausted in reading the same observations so many times that it becomes a tiresome book.
I can see why there was no editor for this book since a real editor would have spent years getting him to realize that a compendium of lectures (which is what this book is according to Taylor) does not lend itself to a good book.
If you want to spend a lot of time getting to how we live in a "Secular Age" which of course we do not if looking at the world as a whole, you may find a few nuggets in here, but you won't find a vein of gold that makes the effort worthwhile. Sadly this book could have been great. Sadly, it is an example of what a poor writer can do with an interesting topic.
I pity any of his students who had to suffer through these lectures without the benefit of lots of caffeine. I am sure Taylor is a very smart and engaging man, as long as you don't have to spend more time with him than the usual checkout line takes at the grocery store.

Can't review because not yet received [Posted on 2008-04-27]
I'd love to review this item, but I've not yet received it, though Amazon promised it by now. What's the holdup?

Robin

For more... [Posted on 2008-06-24]
If you'd like to see more of where Taylor is coming from in this book, check out his interview over at The Other Journal. It's a great read and is specifically relating to this book.

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Landmark portrait of modernity [Posted on 2008-06-24]
An exhaustive, very learned string of reviews on Taylor's study can be found at "The Immanent Frame" ([...]), a blog maintained by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

After all that has been said, I will only add that Taylor's book is work of synthetic and imaginative genius. It offers very comprehensive insight into the condition and history of modernity without subscribing to a unilinear, "subtractionist" notion of secularization. This book will be permanently useful in many disciplines. It is worthy of comparison with Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, but with the huge added advantage that it canvases popular experience as well as the experience of the intellectual elite.

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