A SECULAR AGE

Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Book. Very Good. Hardcover. First Edition. 8 vo,. black cloth, gilt cover and spine, dust jacket, x, 874 pages, CONTENTS: The work of reform -- The bulwarks of belief -- The rise of the disciplinary society -- The great disembedding -- Modern social imaginaries -- The spectre of idealism -- The turning point -- Providential deism -- The impersonal order -- The nova effect -- The malaises of modernity -- The dark abyss of time -- The expanding universe of unbelief -- Nineteenth-century trajectories -- Narratives of secularization -- The age of mobilization -- The age of authenticity -- Religion today -- Conditions of belief -- The immanent frame -- Cross pressures -- Dilemmas 1 -- Dilemmas 2 -- Unquiet frontiers of modernity -- Conversions. "What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.".