Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age by Michael Warner

by Michael Warner

"What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?" This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex "A Secular Age," where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect.

In "Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age," a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which "A Secular Age" intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, Jose Casanova, Nilufer Gole, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood.

"Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age" succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Academic, Philosophy, Politics

Paperback

First published March 15, 2010

About the author

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale, and chair of the department of English. His books include Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Trouble with Normal (1999); and The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he has edited Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 2003); American Sermons (New York: Library of America, 1999); The English Literatures of America (with Myra Jehlen); and Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993).

Reviews

[Samuel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume of papers from a symposium devoted to consideration of Taylor's A Secular Age provides an excellent sense of the scholarly response to his dense, bright rethinking of the stakes and implications of debates about secularism. One sees the outsize influence of disciplinary biases in the essays, and the quality of the essays is highly variable, but this collection is very useful for people wanting to triangulate Taylor's thought among academics. (For a devotional triangulation, see Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular.) While Taylor's own afterword seems to backtrack just a bit from some of his claims in A Secular Age, it nevertheless provides an important, quick overview of what he came to see himself as doing in his magnum opus.

[Jason Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the price just for the chapters by Milbank and Connolly and Taylor

[Nathan Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good essay engagement with Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (which is required reading for this work)