Like the Bible, only different

"It's like the Bible, everyone owns it but nobody reads it." Thus was Charles Taylor's impressive tome A Secular Age described by a friend of a sociologist of religion I met this morning. Taylor's an eminence grise in ethics and political theory, an inspiration to many younger scholars (me included), and this was supposed to be the magnum opus, the masterpiece which would ensure his academic immortality. It's been praised to the skies by other eminences grises and the Economist. But it's very long, chatty, and abstruse. Those who read it seem all, at least privately, to find it frustrating and poorly argued - if there's an argument at all. It may be for the best that people own but don't read it!

But I'm doing a reading course on this book with three of my best students (and we're already frustrated at the book's vagueness and lack of focus). What are we to do? The sociologist of religion suggested we give up on it and instead read some of the interesting responses which it has generated. If not itself the last word on secularism and its discontents, A Secular Age has at least provided an occasion for others to address the topic! I had been hoping the Taylor book might (well, a chapter or two might) anchor the first year seminar I have planned for the Fall, to be called Secularism at the Crossroads. That's impossible now (not least because it's so badly written), but perhaps some of the very articulate responses might serve: not A Secular Age but "the Secular Age debate"!

(The title of this post is inspired by a very clever video on youtube which redeems the slightly creepy "Yes we can" Obamaniac video by parodying it. Pretending to be a pro-McCain video, it ends with the caption LIKE HOPE, ONLY DIFFERENT.) (If you watch them, watch the Obama one first.)