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Taylor?s A Secular Age, reviewed

By Jack M. Balkin

Religious faith today is one option among others. Many people?call them secularists?live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief.

Charles Taylor?s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights.

Taylor?s book is well worth your attention, but it is 874 pages long. So you might find it easier to just read my review of it, recently published in Dissent, and available for a limited time here.

Full post as published by Balkinization on January 26, 2009 (boomark / email).