Our Secular Age
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.
All sessions will be held at 12:30 PM. Lunch will be served.
Schedule
Monday, March 25 | Secularism, Enchantment, and The Human self
In this session, we will discuss Taylor's definition of secularism as a lived experience. Central to this is how we now understand ourselves: not as subjects of divine and evil forces like our medieval predecessors, but as "buffered," self-reflexive individuals.
Monday, April 8 | THe Great Disembedding
In this session, 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.
Monday, AprIL 15 | THe Impersonal Order
In this session, 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.
Monday, April 22 | THe Malaises of Modernity
In this session, we will discuss Taylor’s account of religion in our secular present. Though humanism’s eclipse of the transcendent leaves us all searching for otherworldly meaning, we are faced with a “supernova” of spiritual possibilities amid a pluralist society and authenticity-focused culture.