Varieties of Religion Today

William James Revisited

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by Charles Taylor

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 144 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674007603

A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's work to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. A mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. 

 Promising to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place.

 Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.

Contents

1. James: Varieties
2. The "Twice-Born"
3. Religion Today
4. So Was James Right?

 Notes

Review

In the spring of 1999 Charles Taylor was invited to deliver a set of lectures that attempted to come to grips with the question “What does it mean to call our age secular and how did we get be that way?” As he was preparing the lectures, Taylor found himself returning to William James’s century-old Varieties of Religious Experience, to clarify contemporary religious experience. Thus, Varieties of Religion Today developed into a compelling reassessment of James’s classic work and its relevance to current debates concerning secularism and religion. Taylor considers James’s conception of the individual religious experience in relation to organized religion, his understanding of the ethics of belief, and his analysis of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief and unbelief are perceived. Taylor presents fresh new ways of looking at James, the limitations of his thought, and the many ways he continues to invigorate current religious debates.

Michael Warner, author of the Trouble with Normal, writes, "Charles Taylor's Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited is a lucid, readable gem of a book, crammed with ideas that could do much to transform the current debates about religion and secularism. It places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in a context that is not James's topic at all, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented for individuals in the first place. This shift of analytic frames produces some stunning insights."

For other titles in related subjects:

• Theology
• Religion & Society
• Anglo-American Philosophy