Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Edited by Michael Warner Jonathan VanAntwerpen Craig Calhoun

Harvard University Press, 2010

“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, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood.

TABLE OF CONCTENTS:

• Editors’ Introduction
• 1. Confronting Modernity: Maruyama Masao, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor [Robert N. Bellah]
• 2. A Closer Walk on the Wild Side [John Milbank]
• 3. The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx [Wendy Brown]
• 4. Completing Secularism: The Mundane in the Neoliberal Era [Simon During]
• 5. Belief, Spirituality, and Time [William E. Connolly]
• 6. What Is Enchantment? [Akeel Bilgrami]
• 7. This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor’s Romanticism [Colin Jager]
• 8. Disquieted History in A Secular Age [Jon Butler]
• 9. When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age [Jonathan Sheehan]
• 10. The Civilizational, Spatial, and Sexual Powers of the Secular [Nilüfer Göle]
• 11. A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight? [José Casanova]
• 12. Can Secularism Be Other-wise? [Saba Mahmood]
• Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo [Charles Taylor]

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