What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we - in the West, at least - largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean - of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion - although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined - but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.What this means for the world - including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence - is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

查爾斯·泰勒：加拿大哲學傢，是晚近西方特彆是英美道德哲學中首屈一指的思想傢、社群主義的主將。曾任牛津大學齊切裏哲學與倫理學講座教授，現任加拿大麥基爾大學哲學與政治科學教授。20世紀70年代以來，泰勒以其對黑格爾哲學的再解讀、對原子主義式的消極自由的批評、對社群價值的強調、對西方文化中自我認同觀念發展的梳理、對承認的政治的研究以及對文化多元論的論證，強烈地影響著西方思想界。