James K. A. Smith

I had been meaning for some time to start the most important work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, published in 2007 and considered to be one of the most profound and stimulating analyzes of Western modernity. But the more than 800 pages put me off and they still do. That's why I decided to read this introduction of about 120 pages, it seemed like a manageable chunk. Well, that still was an underestimation, because Taylor's very philosophical reasoning makes this introduction no easy feat.
I was quite impressed by the historical panorama that Taylor sketches of how we have ended up in our secular age, mainly through a combination of the unintended effects of the Reformation, the penchant for the precise observation of nature (naturalism), and the tendency towards nominalism, which dates from the Middle Ages, i.e. the realization that words do not coincide with things. For me as a historian, Taylor uses a very rough brush, but the fact that he continually emphasizes the contingency of the process - in Smith's words a “zigzag account of causal complexity” - made quite an impression. I'll definitely go back to that later.
I must admit that the subsequent description of exactly where we are in the secular era and how we (can) deal with the demons of that era was much more difficult. Taylor does not shy away from detours in his reasoning and regularly introduces new concepts and horizons of insight. It now seems to me that his principal goal was to critique the simplistic contemporary view that the secular, that is to say the exclusive humanistic, view is the only possible realistic view of things, and I can agree with that. Smith emphasizes that Taylor cannot (and does not hide) his Catholic background in his analyzes of possible ways to deal with the ghosts of the secular age, and also that was very recognizable. But I felt that Smith's introduction in this second part remained a little more on the surface, and therefore lacked convincing power. I guess I will have to start that “A Secular Age” myself at some point, but it won't be right away.… (mehr)

This book is great at making accessible the otherwise imposing 900 pg "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor, a book I feel I now need to read in full. However, by its nature as a distillation of a larger philosophical work, this book skips a lot of necessary build up and context needed to fully comprehend some of the later arguments. Terms and definitions are introduced and the immediately used in argument forming before giving them a chance of sinking in. I feel this book is less apt at being an introduction to Taylor's work, as billed, and more a post mortem on "A Secular Age." That said, it succeeded in getting the gist across enough to convince me to eventually read the source. So mission accomplished.… (mehr)