How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

<DIV><I>How (Not) to Be Secular</I> is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work <I>A Secular Age</I> and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times.<br><br>Taylor's landmark book <I>A Secular Age</I> (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.<br><br>Even more, though, Smith's <I>How (Not) to Be Secular</I> 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.<br><br></DIV>