The conditions of believe and unbelieve in a secular Age

Abstract

In A Secular Age the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offered an analytical description and a genealogy of the current conditions of belief and unbelief in the North Atlantic contemporary societies. He encouraged as well a set of similar investigations in other cultural settings that are affected by the processes of modernization. He argues about the existence of ‘alternative modernities’ each one of them facing critically the univocal sociological theories of modernity and secularization that interpreted as universal the process of disenchantment occurred in the West and the setbacks with regard to the presence of religion in the public sphere and religious practice in some contemporary Western societies