"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. 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 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." "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."--Jacket.

The work of reform -- The bulwarks of belief -- The rise of the disciplinary society -- The great disembedding -- Modern social imaginaries -- The spectre of idealism -- The turning point -- Providential deism -- The impersonal order -- The nova effect -- The malaises of modernity -- The dark abyss of time -- The expanding universe of unbelief -- Nineteenth-century trajectories -- Narratives of secularization -- The age of mobilization -- The age of authenticity -- Religion today -- Conditions of belief -- The immanent frame -- Cross pressures -- Dilemmas 1 -- Dilemmas 2 -- Unquiet frontiers of modernity -- Conversions.