A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?

Author: José Casanova

March 1, 2010

In this chapter, a response to Charles Taylor's seminal book, A Secular Age, Jose Casanova praises the comprehensive genealogy of our secular age developed in Taylor's work. As the title indicates, Casanova probes an unresolved tension in Taylor's work: Have we in fact come to understand our secular age so fully because we have in fact already reached the dawn of a new "post-secular" time? Particularly as our global age "provincialized" the European experience, analysts must examine how the European social imaginary interacted with other secular settlements across lines of faith and civilization. This chapter was published in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010, eds. Michael Warner, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen).

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