A friend of mine invited me to join in an on-line review and discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
This book became a little more difficult to source than I first thought. Amazon.ca had only 4 copies left before Christmas, and I was too late to beat the Christmas backlog of orders and the overloaded mail system. And, given the desire to support independent book stores, I inquired at Pages in my neighbourhood to see if they carried the book. They had it on order, and for a whopping $10 more than Amazon. On New Year's Eve day, I went with my family to see if they had it in; getting a new book can be exciting, after all. At 5 minutes before closing, the doors were already locked and the staff members behind the desk insisted it was past closing time, refusing to let us in. We were also mocked - two small children and two exasperated adults locked out in -20C weather can be funny, I suppose.
Sadly, independent book stores cannot compete on price so they rely on the good will of their clients to keep them afloat. Customer service is their only differentiator. It's a little like running a charity, hence how strange it was to have our attempt to give them our business rebuffed.
Never one to give up, I phoned around this morning, loaded up the kids in the double stroller, waded through the slush and snow banks, took the C-Train across town to the south end Chapters, and went home with a new copy at $10 less than it would have cost me at Pages.
It wouldn't be fun if I wasn't already behind. The introduction has been reviewed here.
I'm aiming to get a better understanding of the rise of secularism in the West. Here are some of questions that I hope will be answered (or at the very least pondered):
- Is secularism just another competing parallel "ism", or is it the umbrella under which all other "isms" must learn to exist?
- Is the notion of a secular society a myth?
- How does a Christian let their voice be heard amongst the competing interests of a secular society? Or as better worded by Frank, how do we deal with diversity in a liberal democracy?
