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endrobi 's review for:
A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
There are aspects to this book I enjoyed very much, and aspects that I was equally irritated by. First, in its magnitude A Secular Age is very impressive and Taylor shows convincingly how broad his scholarship on the matters of western history, philosophy and literature is. There are at least dozen references on books I now would like to pick up individually too. Taylor introduces many interesting ideas of his own, while also tying together individual strings of discussion going on in the study of secularization in the past few decades. A rich variety of perspectives he considers was all in all enlightening.
However, occasionally my reading enjoyment threatened to get lost in the sheer disjointedness of the book. It may not be possible to constantly cohesively write on the topic as colourful as this, but occasionally I felt Taylor's trail of thought was difficult to follow and his writing meandered so far from the topic he had started in the chapter, that I could no longer even perceive how it was connected. In addition, Taylor has made the awful choice of dividing his chapters into sections numerically. The division was absolutely needed but how I wished he had chosen to use thematic subtitles instead. When Taylor refers in his text to earlier sections by numbers, I'd be surprised if many of the non-hardcore readers really have any recollection of the topic he is talking about.
This can be a very enlightening book for those with interest on western history of religiosity from Middle Ages to contemporary era (especially concerning UK, France and USA) but it should be noted that his approach especially in the second half is very philosophical and Taylor's own admitted Catholicism gives the book occasionally a tint of spiritual contemplation, rather than pure academic neutrality and thus requires some critical eye as well while reading.
However, occasionally my reading enjoyment threatened to get lost in the sheer disjointedness of the book. It may not be possible to constantly cohesively write on the topic as colourful as this, but occasionally I felt Taylor's trail of thought was difficult to follow and his writing meandered so far from the topic he had started in the chapter, that I could no longer even perceive how it was connected. In addition, Taylor has made the awful choice of dividing his chapters into sections numerically. The division was absolutely needed but how I wished he had chosen to use thematic subtitles instead. When Taylor refers in his text to earlier sections by numbers, I'd be surprised if many of the non-hardcore readers really have any recollection of the topic he is talking about.
This can be a very enlightening book for those with interest on western history of religiosity from Middle Ages to contemporary era (especially concerning UK, France and USA) but it should be noted that his approach especially in the second half is very philosophical and Taylor's own admitted Catholicism gives the book occasionally a tint of spiritual contemplation, rather than pure academic neutrality and thus requires some critical eye as well while reading.