Just a few centuries ago, belief in God 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 15th, we will discuss Enlightenment Deism and its charges against Christian orthodoxy. For Taylor, the former is not a modification or evolution of the latter. Instead, it introduces a new, “disengaged” stance that denies the supernatural a priori, yielding a contrived yet enduring dichotomy between faith and reason.

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