Cronshaw Review of How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, by Smith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is a brilliant tome on faith in a secular age.The Canadian Catholic philosopher has much to teach church leaders and evangelists wanting to understand the place that faith has (or does not have) in people's imaginations today.It is a guidebook for faith in modern so-called secular societya kind of philosophical ethnography, or genealogy of the secular, or story book to describe our intellectual and religious history, or "cultural anthropology for urban mission" (Smith, xi).But at a monumental 847 pages some of us need a guidebook to the guidebook.James K A Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and a widely published author on postmodernism, worldview and faith formation.Smith's How (Not) To Be Secular offers valuable description, analysis and implications from Taylor's work.Taylor's basic question is about the "conditions of belief" where belief has become merely one option among others: "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?"(Taylor, p.25)It is both challenging and encouraging to read a clearly articulated explanation of why our "secular" neighbours aren't asking the questions or looking for the answers we might think about.They don't feel something is "missing."As devotees of "exclusive humanism," their interest in God or the afterlife is minimal.They construct meaning from other projects and quests for significance.Yet this "immanent frame" is haunted by the transcendent.Agnostics feel like there might be something more; even as the devoted doubt what they used to believe.Our world does not have faith and transcendence removed (as "subtraction theories" of secularization suggest), but is a contested, cross-pressured, haunted "secular" world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".