A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Tablet Best Book of the Year W
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundl
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we—in the West, at least—largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly
Religion is commonly imagined as a timeless component of human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered their religion only after India became a
Thought-provoking and tightly argued, this coherent collection of 12 essays engages with the philosophical shift into secularism as described in Taylor's landmark A secular age (Harvard U. Press, 2007
“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a
Religion is commonly imagined as a timeless component of human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered their religion only after India became a
This book traces religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity (Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco), and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007). In all eleven cases, the state - enhanced by post-colonial and post-imperial legacies - highly determines religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education and/or law. Taylor's core condition of secularity - namely, legal permissibility and social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III) - is largely absent in these societies. The areas affected by state regulation, however, differ greatly. In India, Israel and most Muslim countries, questions of religious law are central to state regulation. But it is religious education and organization in China, and church property and public practice in Russia that bear the brunt. This
