Horner's Corner

Tag: secular

Disenchanted: Charles Taylor’s Secular Age

by on Aug.16, 2009, under philosophy, religion

Disenchanted

Bruce Robbins at n +1

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. September 2007.

Books on atheism have been selling like—well, like spiritual self-help books. The unexpected publishing success of Dawkins and Dennett, Hitchens and Harris has left some of us, at least on the more religious side of the Atlantic, fantasizing that we might be at the dawn of a secular New Age. Suddenly it no longer seems the most natural thing in the world that public figures should be compelled to flaunt their faith on pain of political suicide or that matters of war and peace should be routinely referred to the putative wishes of supreme beings armed with super powers. Cracks have appeared in the mandatory public piousness. One can perhaps glimpse a day, not too far from now, when we will wonder how we ever came to play by the rules of that game.

For the moment, however, the game goes on. And there are reasons, of course, for not simply demanding a halt to it. As reviewers have very properly noted, the faithful lend their time and energy to some laudable causes, and they tend to be disproportionately poor and socially marginal. Respect for the person may not entail respect for the ideas the person holds, yet in practice the two are hard to disentangle, and there is a more or less well-founded fear of the political consequences of respect withheld. In the US, the perceived importance of so-called “values” voters in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 plunged the secular left into a crisis of self-scrutiny. (Demands for accommodation with Christian fundamentalism were thankfully more muted in 2008.)

Read more here: Disenchanted | n+1.

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