WORK
A Secular Age (Work)
Taylor's 2007 monumental study of how Western societies moved from conditions in which belief in God was virtually universal to conditions in which it is one option among many — and of what this transformation did to the conditions of meaning itself.
A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007) is an 874-page philosophical history of Western secularization — not as the decline of belief, which Taylor argues is a simplistic story, but as the transformation of the background conditions within which belief and unbelief both become possible. The book introduces the concepts of the immanent frame, the buffered self, cross-pressures, and fullness that have since become central reference points in contemporary debates about religion, meaning, and modernity. Its central argument is that the modern condition is not the absence of religious belief but the presence of new conditions under which all worldviews — religious and secular alike — have become contestable options held against the pervasive awareness that they could be otherwise.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's scope is extraordinary. It traces Western religious and cultural history from roughly 1500 to the present, examining the