How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times.

Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers.

Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

• A Secular Age
• A Secular Age
• Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor
• Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept
• Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
• The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age
• Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness
• Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience
• You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
• Faiths in Conflict?: Christian Integrity in a Multicultural World