How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor cover art

How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

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About this listen

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.

©2014 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (P)2018 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Religious Studies Spirituality
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A very interesting and useful analysis of A Secular Age that makes me want to have another go at it. Unfortunately, the narrator sounds like a smarmy salesman who should be voicing a shopping channel. Who on earth chooses these narrators?

Great book, terrible narration

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I’ve not read a secular age but thoroughly enjoyed this overview. Great introduction for those of us who don’t have the time to read the original. Many thanks

Thoroughly enjoyable

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