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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.
- Sales Rank: #18235 in Books
- Published on: 2014-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .21" w x 6.00" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
Review
Tim Keller
--Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City
"Charles Taylor’s crucial book on our secular age is inaccessible for most people, including the church leaders who desperately need to learn from its insight. Jamie Smith’s book is the solution to this problem. As a gateway into Taylor’s thought, this volume (if read widely) could have a major impact on the level of theological leadership that our contemporary church is getting. It could also have a great effect on the quality of our communication and preaching. I highly recommend this book."
T. M. Luhrmann
--Stanford University
"This is a brilliant, beautifully written book on the dilemma of faith in a modern secular age. It introduces the reader to the material in Taylor’s dense book, of course, but it does more. It invites the reader on a journey through the experience of the spirit in different centuries, and how our conceptions of mind and person shape belief in ways far more intimate than we usually imagine. How (Not) to Be Secular is a gem."
Hans Boersma
--Regent College
"Charles Taylor’s daunting tome, A Secular Age, has just turned a great deal less intimidating. Combining his usual lucid style, his love for literature, and his passion for the church’s future, Jamie Smith offers a faithful guide through the pages of Taylor’s monumental work. Along the way, he wisely cautions his co-religionists against facile responses to the ‘disenchantment’ of modernity, but he also insists that the Christian faith may have much more going for it than many recognize."
Christian Century
�“The importance of A Secular Age is matched by its inaccessibility. It is a great woolly mammoth of a book. . . . Smith’s book does great work in opening Taylor’s tome to a wider readership. His commentary is clear, accurate, and insightful. It is also concise, leading readers deep into Taylor’s ideas in well under 200 pages. Smith’s sure grasp of Taylor’s big picture makes the details of the argument pop with fresh intelligibility.”
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Religious Studies Review
�“For those who have been intimidated by Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age (2007), Smith has provided an accessible entry point to Taylor’s work in How (Not) To Be Secular. . . . The work endeavors to distill Taylor’s work for a wider audience and is more digestible than Taylor’s daunting volume thanks to Smith’s lucid and engaging prose. Those desiring an accurate summary of Taylor’s work or those looking for a more sophisticated understanding of the secular age would find this book well worth the time.”
Cresset
“Splendid, yet accessible and brief overview and discussion of what is arguably the most widely discussed work of philosophy of the last twenty years.”
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Books & Culture
“An altogether readable, charming and short introduction to Taylor’s behemoth.”
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First Things
“Those looking for an introduction to this supremely important work (Taylor’s A Secular Age) but reluctant to wade through its 896 pages can turn to this economical commentary.”
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Choice
“Smith offers a reader’s guide to Taylor’s lengthy work. This book succeeds as both a summation of Taylor’s argument . . . and as a light critique. . . .A sympathetic, astute summation of Taylor’s most ambitious work. Recommended.”
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Englewood Review of Books
“This is philosophy with feet, a thick theology that will get your heart beating because it meets you in the complicated world we all share.”
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University Bookman
“Already in previous books Smith has proven himself adept at translating difficult philosophical and theological ideas for the broader church and culture. How (Not) to Be Secular continues in this trajectory. It is part cultural analysis, part philosophical ethnography, always accessible, and always with an eye toward the implications of Taylor’s insights for the practice of Christian faith.”
The Presbyterian Outlook
“If one wants to understand the roots of our current cultural condition, Charles Taylor’s book is essential. There is no better guide to it than James K. A. Smith.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Well written, clear, and accessible. Most important, it supplies a very reliable reconstruction of the essentials of Taylor’s position. Smith is particularly adept at emphasizing the existential quality of Taylor’s analysis of secularity: what does it feel like to be a believer or non-believer in the modern Western world? . . . Anyone seeking a quick but dependable overview of Taylor’s argument in A Secular Age would benefit immensely from Smith’s book. . . . [It] is a fine achievement and accomplishes just what it sets out to: providing its readers with a reliable road map to Charles Taylor’s account of our secular age.”
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About the Author
James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College, where he also teaches in the congregational and ministry studies department.
Most helpful customer reviews
79 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
Making a Genius More Accessible
By David George Moore
I say "more accessible" because this is hardly A Secular Age for Dummies. Charles Taylor's massive and dense book is tough sledding. I have not read much of it, but am certainly familiar with the work of Taylor.
In How (Not) to Be Secular, Jamie Smith brings the intellectual cookies to a lower shelf, but don't be fooled, serious thinking is still required. Smith respects his readers by providing an accessible, yet thoughtful distillation of one of the most consequential books of our day.
Instead of doing a typical book review, let me briefly mention six things I appreciated about this book:
*The writing style is elegant and engaging. Let me give one example from page 11: "Ardor and devotion cannot undo the shift in plausibility structures that characterizes our age." This is wonderfully conceived, but it is also pregnant with implications.
*There is a judicious use of illustrations from literature, music, and movies.
*Since I am not a dispassionate reader on the subject of doubt (I know the struggle to believe firsthand), I am grateful for the insights on living in this unusual climate of secularism.
*The author is careful to understand his subject matter. A good example is the compassionate assessment of the troubled genius, David Foster Wallace. Smith does not offer a glib critique of Wallace's writings. Wallace is looked at seriously, even one could say, sympathetically. To be sure, Smith does not agree with Wallace's overall philosophy, but Smith does a good job of showing how others have missed salient features of Wallace's approach.
*Smith clearly appreciates Charles Taylor's overall project in A Secular Age. However, that does not impede Smith from offering important pushbacks and critiques.
*Both Smith and Taylor understand that a silly, sentimental, and Sunday School-ish type of faith is hardly enough to stave off the onslaughts of secularism. Smith does a good job of showing how foolish it is to abandon the Christian faith for the "mature" position of materialism. Rather, we ought to abandon the trivial or superficial beliefs of American Christianity.
39 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
The traditional story of how to the world came to be secular (a subtraction of belief) is not the real story.
By Adam Shields
Starting last year I have been paying a lot of attention to James KA Smith (Jamie). The first book of his that came across my radar screen was Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. (I still haven’t actually read that one, it is on my list for this summer.)
But I did read Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. And it really did fundamentally change my perspective on liturgy and worship. Since then I regularly read Smith’s editorials (he is the editor of Comment magazine) and I have slowly been reading some of his other books.
How (Not) to Be Secular is the type of book I wish were more popular. For important ideas to really take hold, we need good authors to popularize those important ideas into formats that a general public can understand. Charles Taylor’s A Secular age is a massive and important book, but at 900 pages it is too long (and too dense) for most readers. (And more than a few people have suggested Taylor is not the most readable author.) So Jamie Smith has put together a 148 page companion that covers the basics of the argument and includes relevant contemporary examples.
The basic idea of A Secular Age is to explain what it means to live in a secular age and how we have come to this place in culture.
"We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives. Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament, thrown back onto themselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs."
Taylor’s innovation is how he reframes discussion about secularization from what it has lost (belief in God) to how the very nature of belief claims have changed.
“...these questions are not concerned with what people believe as much as with what is believable. The difference between our modern, “secular” age and past ages is not necessarily the catalogue of available beliefs but rather the default assumptions about what is believable. It is this way of framing the question that leads to Taylor’s unique definition of 'the secular.’"
There is no good way to summarize this book. Smith already has condensed a 900 page book into 148 pages and I can’t condense that 148 pages into 700 words. But there are a couple points that really struck me as important. First, it is a good reminder that our world is not the only possible world. We have one 'take' on the world, that is not the same one that our pre-modern ancestors had, and it is not the only possible one that could have come about.
Second, part of how secularization came about is that God moved from the being that controlled everything, to the being that put everything into place. So where pre-moderns saw God's hand in everything, we tend to see God as a step removed. The sun rises not because God told it to rise, but because God put into place a natural world that makes it appear that the sun is rising. It is probably more important for Christians to understand how our world has changed than non-Christians because our very belief systems now have to take into account not only the reality of God in the world, but the reality of God in a world that has moved God yet another step away.
Third, as has been noted by a number of books I have been reading lately, the real incarnation of Jesus as human becomes even more important (and in some ways more unbelieveable) because of the way that modern culture understands God as other.
And fourth, we cannot turn back.
"So shouldn’t an “authentic” Christianity want to turn back the clock? “Isn’t the answer easy? Just undo the anthropocentric turn” (p. 651). Not so fast, cautions Taylor. First, even if we wanted to, there’s no simplistic going back. The anthropocentric turn is in the water; it’s increasingly the air we breathe.31 Not even orthodox Christians might realize the extent to which we’ve absorbed this by osmosis. Second, for Taylor, we shouldn’t want to."
If you are interested in my take aways, Smith did do an interview with his publisher about the book that I think does a very good job introducing the book and giving you are good jumpstart on Taylor. [...]
If you are frustrated with the way that apologetics are done in the church, or with how many seem to be missing the point (both inside and outside the church) of what it means to believe in something this might be a helpful book.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
a book about a book as good as the book
By Clint Schnekloth
Not every book about a book is a good book. This book about a book is not only a good book... it is a great book! Smith handily summarizes Charles Taylor's complex argument on secularity in his magnum opus, A Secular Age. You can read Smith's book as a chapter by chapter commentary on Taylor's book (it is that). But the book also stands alone as a summary presentation of Taylor's overall argument. It also stands alone as an introduction to secularity and contemporary philosophical reflection on it.
In other words, you don't have to read Taylor while reading Smith. You can read Smith, and with great benefit.
This book originated in a class Smith hosted with students, a focused reading of A Secular Age. Readers could do a lot worse than assemble a group of sympathetic souls, and read Smith and Taylor together over a summer or semester. On the other hand, if you've been curious about Taylor but intimidated by the heft of A Secular Age, Smith offers here a handy and wonderful primer.
One of the most helpful parts of the book is Smith's glossary. He offers simple definitions of some of Taylor's technical terminology. I believe these will solidify some of the terminological discussions around Taylor's work. See the definition of things like Age of Authenticity, Buffered Self, Cross-Pressure, Social Imaginary, the Unthought, and Excarnation.
This is a handy, helpful, and wonderful short read. You will not be disappointed.
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