Reading Charles Taylor
James K. A. Smith
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.
All rights reserved
Published 2014 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 / P.O. Box 163, Cambridge cb3 9pu U.K.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, James K. A., 1970–
How (not) to be secular: reading Charles Taylor / James K.A. Smith.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8028-6761-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Christian philosophy. 2. Christianity—Philosophy.
3. Taylor, Charles, 1931– Secular age. 4. Secularism.
5. Religion and culture. I. Title.
BR100.S533 2014
230.01—dc23
2013049154
Introduction: Our Cross-Pressured Present: Inhabiting a Secular Age
1. Reforming Belief: The Secular as Modern Accomplishment
2. The Religious Path to Exclusive Humanism: From Deism to Atheism
3. The Malaise of Immanence: The “Feel” of a Secular Age
4. Contesting the Secularization2 Thesis
5. How (Not) to Live in a Secular Age
You’re a pastor or a church planter who has moved to Brooklyn or Berkeley or Boulder. Maybe you received a call to transplant yourself from Georgia or Grand Rapids or some other “religious” region of the country, sensing a burden to proclaim the gospel in one of the many so-called “godless” urban regions of North America. You’ve left your Jerusalem on a mission to Babylon. You came with what you thought were all the answers to the unanswered questions these “secular” people had. But it didn’t take long for you to realize that the questions weren’t just unanswered; they were unasked. And they weren’t questions. That is, your “secular” neighbors aren’t looking for “answers”—for some bit of information that is missing from their mental maps. To the contrary, they have completely different maps. You’ve realized that instead of nagging questions about God or the afterlife, your neighbors are oriented by all sorts of longings and “projects” and quests for significance. There doesn’t seem to be anything “missing” from their lives—so you can’t just come proclaiming the good news of a Jesus who fills their “God-shaped hole.” They don’t have any sense that the “secular” lives they’ve constructed are missing a second floor. In many ways, they have constructed webs of meaning that provide almost all the significance they need in their lives (though a lot hinges on that “almost”).
Suffice it to say that the paradigms you brought to your ministry have failed to account for your experience thus far. You thought you were moving to a world like yours, just minus God; but in fact, you’ve moved to a different world entirely. It turns out this isn’t like the Mars Hill of Saint Paul’s experience (in Acts 17) where people are devoted to all kinds of deities and you get to add to their pantheon by talking ...
|
About How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles TaylorHow (Not) to Be Secular is what author 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. James K. A. Smith’s book is a compact field guide to Taylor’s 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 manual of how to live in our secular age. It offers an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today’s secular culture, no matter who “we” are—believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. |
| Support Info | hwntbrchrlstylr |