Just a few centuries ago, belief in God was was virtually unchallenged throughout the Western world. Today, faith seems like one option among many, and often not the easiest to embrace. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age examines this shift, challenging the conventional “subtraction” story: secularization is not the inevitable loss of religion to science or reason, but the complex, socially-engineered rise of self-sufficient humanism. The upshot has been a transformation of individual identity and communal life, a transformation that demands dialogue and negotiation between believers and nonbelievers.

On Monday, April 8th, we will discuss the core of Taylor’s secularization narrative: that Western disenchantment emerged from attempts to standardize and purify Christian worship. According to Taylor, the successes of early-modern religious reform inspired utopian, anthropocentric, and individualistic understandings of social order.

This seminar is the second in our Spring 2024 series Our Secular Age.