A Secular Age
Book by Charles TaylorWikipedia
19
MENTIONS
11
EPISODES
10
PODCASTS
Search complete. 19 mentions across 11 episodes found for "A Secular Age".
Oct 9, 2026
Adam CurryHOST
Charles Taylor? Who's Charles Taylor?
Dave JonesHOST
He wrote a book called "A Secular Age."
Adam CurryHOST
Oh, yeah.
Adam CurryHOST
Okay.
Peter LynasGUEST
There is no God, we are told.
Peter LynasGUEST
The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote, uh, an incredible book called The Secular Age.
Peter LynasGUEST
It's about 900 pages long.
Peter LynasGUEST
I don't think anybody's actually read it, but we all pretend we have and talk about it.
AndreHOST
He's a Roman Catholic philosopher.
AndreHOST
And in his book, The Secular Age, A Secular Age, he describes how the West has moved from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one.
AndreHOST
And pre-modern people, he says, live with a kind of porous self.
AndreHOST
So this is his key idea here.
Ted ZornHOST
So I light this candle for all the joys and concerns held in our hearts and left unspoken.
Ted ZornHOST
My reading for today is by Rachel Carson, who many of you may recognize from the book that she's known best for, which was called Silent Spring.
Ted ZornHOST
It was published in 1962 and launched the modern environmental movement.
Ted ZornHOST
Today's reading is an excerpt from a later book by Rachel Carson called The Sense of Wonder, published in 1998.
Ted ZornHOST
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.
Ted ZornHOST
It is our misfortune that for most of us, that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
Niki HarréGUEST
And in 2021, I undertook what could be called action research in which for a year I investigated Christianity, the religion of my heritage, and I was a secular priest.
Niki HarréGUEST
To be clear, it was a role I made up.
Niki HarréGUEST
I'm an atheist, and in 2021, I undertook what could be called action research, in which for a year I investigated Christianity, the religion of my heritage, and I was a secular priest.
Niki HarréGUEST
To be clear, it was a role I made up, and I wrote a book about it, um, published in March this year.
Niki HarréGUEST
So, in brief, the outline of the project, I had three vows: simplicity, hospitality, and pause.
Niki HarréGUEST
I offered three Sunday services a month, followed by an online service at se- 7:00 AM on Wednesdays on the same theme.
Niki HarréGUEST
And I attended a Christian church, Rhythms of Grace, which meets in the undercroft of Parnell Cathedral and is a non-denominational church, for the year.
Niki HarréGUEST
I did formal interviews with Christian leaders and read a lot of Christian literature, including the whole Bible, and listened to podcasts.
Niki HarréGUEST
I advertised all of this through a website, secularpriest.org, with the initial byline, "A space to help people seek, find, and live their contribution to the world we share." The purpose, as in the subtitle of my book, is, was to explore what the secular world could learn from religion, with Christianity being the one I explored in depth because it was the one closest to me.
Niki HarréGUEST
Now, one unexpected finding of the project was that after a few months, I experienced what I dubbed a strange new feeling of happiness.
Richard TarnasGUEST
And, okay, so I'm simplifying a complex story, but With the coming of, there's a whole sequence that happens after the Axial era as the Axial breakthrough is gradually integrated into these hierarchical archaic societies in Rome, but particularly in medieval Europe.
Richard TarnasGUEST
And Charles Taylor becomes the great scholar of that development in a book called A Secular Age.
Richard TarnasGUEST
extraordinary work like Bella's Religion and Human Evolution.
Richard TarnasGUEST
Both of them are published by Harvard University Press, by the way.
Pete AllensonHOST
Yeah, that's right.
Pete AllensonHOST
Charles Taylor wrote a big book in 2014 called The Secular Age.
Pete AllensonHOST
And in America, we live in a secular age, pretty much.
Steve BrownHOST
So some people would say, forget them all.
Trevor SuttonGUEST
Yeah, so vertical and horizontal time, this, this comes from a philosopher, Charles Taylor, phenomenal philosopher.
Trevor SuttonGUEST
Uh, he, he wrote a, a book called The Secular Age.
Trevor SuttonGUEST
Um, and, and in this book and other places that he writes about, he uses some of that language, uh, vertical time, higher time, ordinary time, and, and, that sort of thing.
Trevor SuttonGUEST
And it's basically...
Stephen McAlpineGUEST
Well, there's a little sense in that it's always been because part of the cable car narrative is the secular story.
Stephen McAlpineGUEST
And Charles Taylor, who wrote A Secular Age, pitches the idea of the secular story is what he calls a subtraction story.
Stephen McAlpineGUEST
He says that secularism says once we strip away a lot of stuff, you get to basic bedrock reality, which is secularism and science and rationality and good governance and modern ideas of economics will smooth life out.
Stephen McAlpineGUEST
And that's a very Western way of looking at how we can solve things.
Tolulope MoodyHOST
He's a French Canadian philosopher.
Tolulope MoodyHOST
He has this book he wrote called The Secular Age.
Tolulope MoodyHOST
And he would argue that when people say things like, Oh, I used to be a believer, but now I'm no longer a believer.
Tolulope MoodyHOST
And Charles Taylor would argue and say that there's no absence of believing.
1 more episode mentions A Secular Age.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.