Secular Imaginaries: Introduction

Abstract

The papers gathered in this issue were first presented at a conference on "Secular Imaginaries" that took place on May 3-5, 2007 at the New School for Social Research, dedicated to an examination of the life work of Charles Taylor, with special focus on the forthcoming publication of A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007). Taylor's summa philosophica has already proven extremely influential and has contributed to consequential debates on the conditions and modes of the secular, secularizations and secularisms in our global age. In a certain sense, Taylor's A Secular Age offers the best analytical, phenomenological and genealogical account we have of our modern, secular condition. Analytically, it explains with distinct clarity the structural interlocking constellation of the cosmic, social and moral orders that constitute the self-sufficient immanent frame within which we are constrained to live and experience our lives, secular as well as religious. All three orders, the cosmic, the social, and the moral are understood as purely immanent secular orders, devoid of transcendence. It is this phenomenological experience that constitutes our age paradigmatically as a secular one, irrespective of the extent to which people living in this age may still hold religious or theistic beliefs. Indeed, Taylor's primary interest is not to offer a sociological account of secularity in terms of standard theories of secularization which measure the changing, mostly falling, rates of religious beliefs and practices in modern contemporary societies. Taylor is primarily interested in offering a phenomenological account of the secular "conditions" of belief and of the "pre-ontological" context of understanding in order to explain the change from a Christian society around 1500CE in which belief in God was unchallenged and unproblematic, indeed "naive" and taken for granted, to a post-Christian society today in which belief in God not only is no longer axiomatic, but becomes increasingly problematic so