Review: David Lyon on Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, 352 pp. $US 45.00 hardcover (978-0-674-04857-7).

This book is a series of appreciative but trenchant responses to Charles Taylor’s intellectual blockbuster, A Secular Age (2007). While, like Taylor, they deal in philosophical issues, the specific perspectives include anthropology, history, political studies, sociology and theology. The challenge to sociology is profound. The new ways of conceiving the “secular,” expounded at length by Taylor, are variously explored, probed, questioned, criticized and affirmed by the authors, … Read more