Reddit reviews How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
We found 6 Reddit comments about How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
William B Eerdmans Publishing Company
I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802867618/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Y8jRDb10R02NG
I've become predictable!
If you want to dig into the concept a bit more, I highly recommend "How (Not) to be Secular." Definitely not our term.
I agree with a lot of what /u/Diet_Victreebel wrote. The idea that "belief" is solely a head-based, intellectual exercise is actually quite new and shaped by Western cultural thinking. These days I understand faith more in the sense of trust. For example, believing that a Ferris wheel is operating under a set of mechanics that will support its structure is different than trusting in those mechanics enough to step inside it and go around. The book How (Not) to be Secular has helped me understand how we have come to understand belief in its modern sense, and how we can conceive of other possibilities. I don't always agree with the author but I highly recommend it.
My top recommendation is Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation by Allen and Swain. If you haven't read it please do. It's not the easiest read, but well worth the effort.
A close second is Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ by Todd Billings. If you or a loved one are suffering, read this right away. If not, read it anyway for when the time comes.
A few more that I have on my list to read, but have not yet read:
You are correct that many Christians take offense, and of course they do. Their fundamental sense of self is rooted in belief. However, the atheist is no different. You yourself indicated this with the last line of your post. When one's paradigm is challenged, it is normal for those who are not used to dialogue with other paradigms to lash out like white blood cells attacking a foreign body in the bloodstream. At the very least, if you're looking for academic dialogue about Christianity, you'll need to stop going to non-academic Christians. The examples of Trump representing (and in my opinion, "Christian" Trump supporters) true orthodox (correct) theology is simply false, along with any Christian institution that "bears fruit" of violence, etc.
As an aside, I also picked up a small but strong presupposition common among many atheists/agnostics (assuming atheism/ag from your post, correct if wrong) that the book is closed academically on the existence of God. I would assume that you're aware that at the most basic level, the belief in or not in God is indeed still a belief and can never be proven; this is much more problematic for the positivist than the believer. Fortunately for us all, the metamodern landscape has resulted in the contesting of all things secular and religious. There is no longer (nor ever was) a separation.
I would recommend these books to you for some further reading on the point: #1 and #2. Here are to qualifying reviews on the first text. 1 and 2.
Hope it helps.
There are good reasons to believe it's true. But perhaps what I want to encourage you with is that everyone has seasons of doubt like this. I think it's easy for Christian communities to demonize doubt and dismiss it as somehow bad or sinful. But as Smith says in How (Not) to be Secular, most ordinary folks live in between the extremes of belief and doubt, between fundamentalism and new atheism, in a world haunted by the other: believers are haunted by doubt and skeptics are haunted by belief. It's only human to live in this space. That said, I encourage you to find a way forward, seeking truth, because if Christ is true, you'll find Him.