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In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society and soul of Western humanity. What does it mean to live in an age where religion, once the very matrix of social existence, is relegated to the realm of private and personal choice? What defines secularity? Are modern people really as "irrelegious" as we make them out to be? In this episode, JF and Phil squarely train their sights on a question that continues to haunt them, with Taylor as their Virgil in what amounts to a descent into the ordinary inferno of modern unknowing.

Header Image by Pahudson, via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
\nCharles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
\nWeird Studies, ep 71: The Medium is the Message
\nPenn & Teller, Bullshit
\nRen\xe9 Descartes, Meditations
\nTheodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture
\nThomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
\nJacques Ellul, The New Demons
\nDavid Foster Wallace's essay on David Letterman
\nRichard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
\nEric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
\nKarl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History