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How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" - it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work, A Secular Age, and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times.
Taylor's landmark book, A Secular Age (2007), provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present - a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers.
Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are - whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.
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James V. Schall is a treasure of the Catholic intellectual tradition. A prolific author and essayist, Schall readily connects with his readers on sundry topics from war to friendship, philosophy, politics, and to ordinary everyday living. In his newest work, The Mind That Is Catholic, he presents a retrospective collection of his academic and literary essays written in the past 50 years.
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Profound Insights
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Secular Buddhism
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As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism, and the practice occurs within secular contexts such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace. Is it possible to recover from the Buddhist teachings a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious without compromising the integrity of the tradition?
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Good, but repetition of old material
- By Ludwig on 02-25-18
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Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
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This sharp commentary on the rise and current decline of Western Civilization touches on historical moments - including the building of early universities in the Middle Ages and the American Revolution - and figures - including Augustine, Acquinas, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith - that exemplify the faith-reason synthesis at the heart of Western Civilization, as well as the modern villains that threaten to destroy it.
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Excellent description of the current state of the West
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The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
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In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.
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Such a relevant book to our current world
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Irrational Man
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Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.
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heady
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The God Argument
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What are the arguments for and against religion and religious belief - all of them - right across the range of reasons and motives that people have for being religious, and do they stand up to scrutiny? Can there be a clear, full statement of these arguments that once and for all will show what is at stake in this debate? Equally important: what is the alternative to religion as a view of the world and a foundation for morality?
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Fascinating Topic Made Mind Numbingly Dull
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The Case for God
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Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable?
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Great recasting of how God should be interpreted
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Martin Heidegger
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With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger." (George Kateb, The New Republic)
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Fantastic - very approachable yet competent
- By Bob on 04-15-19
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Eager to Love
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Francis of Assisi is one of the most beloved of all saints. Both traditional and entirely revolutionary, he was a paradox. He was at once down-to-earth and reaching toward heaven, grounded in the rich history of the Church while moving toward a new understanding of the world beyond. Franciscan Father Richard Rohr helps us look beyond the birdbath image of the saint to remind us of the long tradition founded on Francis' revolutionary, radical, and life-changing embrace of the teachings of Jesus.
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Richard Rohr Should Read Richard Rohr
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Excellent book!
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learn to diagonalize.
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What listeners say about How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
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- Professor814
- 07-17-23
Excellent
This is an excellent commentary on Taylor’s “A Secular Age”. The rendering is well done.
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- Jesus
- 05-29-18
Accessible Charles Taylor!
I have tried to read Charles Taylor... many times. Couldn't make it through. James Smith explains Taylor in a way that everyone can understand. The narration is spot on. Nice job! Worth a listen.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Chris
- 06-09-20
Very helpful.
Listened to Taylor’s A Secular Age last year, and have enjoyed some of Smith’s other recent volumes. I was not disappointed here, and would like to admit that the themes opened up and explored in these and importantly related works (e.g., McIntyre’s After Virtue) have helped to foster a deeper sense of humility and hunger for the enduring (necessary!) relevance of Scripture and our desperate need for reconciliation with God and with others across this globe who are similarly made in God’s image but bruised and broken by sin and it’s psychological, social, political and indeed cosmic consequences. Learning to discover afresh Augustine’s filial cry that we are made for God and our hearts are restless until they rest in him.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Andrew Meher
- 06-16-23
Incredibly helpful book. Would like it to be re-recorded though
I read the book along with listening to the audio. It is invaluable and helpful.
However I noticed a lot of mistakes in the audio version. And some recording/production mistakes. Words mis-pronounced, sentences read twice in a row, entire phrases skipped over.
Would love this reproduced for those who are only listening as it helps to name so many things in our culture.
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- Malcolm
- 04-17-18
Charles Taylor... Explained
Would you listen to How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor again? Why?
Yes. I am a huge fan of Jamie Smith. Love this book in print... and with that voice of the narrator = perfection in audio!
What did you like best about this story?
Not really a story. Accessible analysis of Charles Taylor. Very thoughtful.
Have you listened to any of Trevor Thompson’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Yes. Solid and competent narration. Golden voice.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes.
Any additional comments?
Listen to this book!
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10 people found this helpful
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- Elizabeth Weddington
- 04-20-20
Tough to begin, but well worth the finish!
Being that this is an academic work, I thought it would be too challenging to listen to an audiobook version. and whole at first I was right, I was quickly swept up into this and am thoroughly glad I finished the book. This challenges how we look at our world today and helps us see that we are all much more similar than we may care to admit to our neighbors.
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3 people found this helpful
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- SuffFam
- 02-26-20
Still pretty dense reading/listening
The author says it is a more accessible version of Taylor, but it's still very academic. Much of it is very interesting, especially as it sets up the premise. But I was hoping for more in the conclusion in terms of how to live in and communicate faith in the secular age. The narrator does a good job with text that is surely very difficult to read aloud. The listener will have to catch on quickly to the philosophical jargon or be completely lost really quickly.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Shaun Barnes
- 02-17-24
Glad it’s Over
The book is inconsistent in some areas when it refers to A Secular Age. This is probably because it is reference book. I have the hard copy too. Only purchased for class.
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- James Parker
- 06-24-19
Just OK
Evidently written for millennials, the writing is presumptively chatty, peppered with inside jokes, verbal nudges and winks, and hip musical references that left me at a loss. The reader was unbearably but appropriately smug. (P.S. He knows something you don’t.)
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- Adam Shields
- 07-29-18
skip the audio read the print
Four years ago, I was very favorable toward How (Not) to Be Secular, since then I have read a number of books that have interacted with Charles Taylor, although none of them have attempted what Jamie Smith has attempted here. In How (Not) To Be Secular, Smith is attempting to summarize Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age while at the same time critiquing some of A Secular Age's weak points. Other very helpful books have talked about broad ideas or using A Secular Age as a jumping off point. In some ways, it is easier to understand Taylor if you do not have to take the full range of ideas and the full development of Taylor’s argument.
After four years and a number of books about Taylor, I have decided that this fall I need to start reading Charles Taylor directly. I have a couple reasons for that, but primarily what I am interested in is Taylor’s work on how we create identity differently in our current world and how faith works in created identity. I am going to be reading Taylor with a strong eye toward how minority (both racial and other) identity works in his system of understanding the world around us.
I have been intimidated by Charles Taylor. Too many people that I know, and respect as smarter than I, have talked about how difficult Taylor can be to understand. I picked up How (Not) to Be Secular as a preparation and like I tend to do I changed formats on a second reading. And because the audiobook of How (Not) to Be Secular was released recently I picked up the audiobook. Audiobook is not a format that works well with this book.
I really do appreciate that Eerdmans has been releasing a number of their books in audiobook formate lately. I do not like that so far, none of them have been synced to the kindle edition. The problem with the lack of syncing is that I cannot alternate back and forth easily and I cannot easily find print form of a text if it is difficult to understand in audio. Or quickly find a quote I want to highlight to write about later. I have no idea how hard it is to sync the audio and kindle versions, but I do hope that Eerdmans and other smaller niche publishers can learn how to do it and see it as a valuable tool for the reader.
I did listen to all of this and it did help me remember parts of the book that I had forgotten. It has not made me more comfortable approaching Taylor directly because it was so hard to understand in audiobook format. But I am going to go ahead with starting with Taylor by picking up one of his older books, Multiculturalism, since it directed addresses one of my questions about Taylors project.
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