Reddit mentions of A Secular Age

This is a pretty big question, Charles Taylor recently wrote a 900 page book about it in fact. Wiki has a fairly decent summary of Taylor's thesis, which I think is fairly strong. There's also an excellent 30+ page review, with a reply by Taylor, in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Religion. There are assuredly a ton of reviews of Taylor, it was an extremely important book. That would be a good place to get started (with the reviews, I mean, it may be a bit much to digest 900 pages).

I would skip Lewis, honestly. He's popular among certain Potestant trends of thought, but the Anglicans consider him something of an embarrassment, and he himself readily admits that he's no theologian. If you really want a pop-theology argument, I'd go to Chesterson's Orthodoxy instead, but even that's pretty low tier apologetic.

If you want serious theology and apologetic, Lewis has plenty of contemporaries that are worth reading. I'd suggest the following:

• Rudolph Otto, [The Idea of the Holy][1], which deals specifically with the numinous argument for theism -- that is, the argument that religious belief should be couched in the experience of the ineffable;
  
  
• Tielhard de Chardin, [The Divine Milieu][2], which addresses theism from the other side of a secular worldview, integrating a scientific and philosophical world view into a holistic religious sense;
  
  
• Paul Tillich, [The Dynamics of Faith][3], which begins with an examination of the phenomenon of faith and explores the notion of God as the logical terminus of faith;
  
  Even the longest of those three is still less than 300 pages, so they shouldn't be too daunting in terms of bulk, but they're all three packed with some very serious and challenging thought, so they should give you plenty to chew on. My only caution is that all three of them veer in their latter thirds towards a bias for specifically Christian theism, and particularly Protestant varieties. It's a bit of a disappointing given how they all three start out admirably ecumenical.
  
  All of those are specifically books written by theologians with the intent of making the 20th century comfortable with religion again, but while I'm at it I thought I'd throw out a few books that don't quite fall into the group:
  
  
• Mircea Eliade, [The Sacred and the Profane][4], which is not an argument for theism so much as an anthropological and sociological exploration into the nature of religion;
  
  
• Terry Eagleton, [Reason, Faith, and Revolution][5], which is novel precisely because it features a Marxist atheist arguing against the "New Atheists" to the effect that religion is valuable;
  
  
• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, which I haven't actually read yet, but intend to, because the reviews that I've read of it mark it as one of the thorniest and most grandiose defenses of religion written in recent history.
  
  Good luck.
  
  [1]: http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Holy-R-Otto/dp/0195002105/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253024930&sr=8-1
  [2]: http://www.amazon.com/Divine-Milieu-Pierre-Teilhard-Chardin/dp/1903900581/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253025127&sr=1-3
  [3]: http://www.amazon.com/Dynamics-Faith-Perennial-Classic-Tillich/dp/0060937130/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253025305&sr=1-3
  [4]: http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Profane-Nature-Religion/dp/015679201X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253025876&sr=1-1
  [5]: http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Faith-Revolution-Reflections-Lectures/dp/0300151799/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253025995&sr=1-1
  

Permit me to comment on/question the following quote:

> I would like to invite a conversation of how the "radical" perspective might be able to "go postformal" so to speak in the face of this traditional awareness of forms, i.e. by revealing them to somehow be ultimately empty, not truly life-affirming, or else maybe even harmful when dealing with particular and unique individuals, etc.

First, it seems to me that the doctrine of original sin addresses these concerns quite well, although I'm not sure it would concede that form is "ultimately empty" (I'll return to this in my second point). That the church, Catholic or otherwise, should never become too comfortable in its ways, formal or otherwise, is implied by the belief that the time within which the church finds itself is fallen. We can see this sort of thing in Charles Taylor's discussion of the relationship of sin to the church as

> a skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other, rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property... The corruption of this network comes when it falls back into something more "normal" in worldly terms. Sometimes a church community becomes a tribe (or takes over an existing tribal society), and treats outsiders as Jews treated Samaritans (Belfast). But the really terrible corruption is a kind of falling forward, in which the church develops into something unprecedented. The network of agape involves a kind of fidelity to the new relations; and because we can all too easily fall away from this (which falling away we call "sin"), we are led to shore up these relations; we institutionalize them, introduce rules, divide responsibilities; but we are now living caricatures of the network life. We have lost some of the communion, the "conspiratio", which is at the heart of the Eucharist. The spirit is strangled (A Secular Age, p. 739).

If the church becomes too comfortable with formal distinctions, if it is not willing to continually go back and critically appropriate in order to avoid reverting back to a form of community that is based on possessing identifiable properties, then it has reconciled itself to sin. This is, literally, not good.

Second, the idea that all forms or orderings are ultimately empty vis-a-vis the particular and unique individual presupposes what I take to be a rather truncated (dare I say liberal or atomistic?) view of the self and its relation to its past. I'd like to hermeneutically wager that good ways of being lie hidden beneath the forms and orderings. That is, forms and orderings reflect real and distinct ways of being that arise out of the free interaction of enfleshed individuals in skeins of agape. What these forms and orderings, if uncritically affirmed or fetishized, become is what Ivan Illich calls

> the perversio optimis quae est pessima (the perversion of the best which is the worst) (The Rivers North of the Future, p. 56).

This, it seems to me, is precisely the idea which Alison is articulating, except he's pointing to a new way of being that is for the most part unprecedented when it comes to the historical development of Christian forms and orderings.

Third, and finally, I would like to note that this hermeneutic approach need not preclude the possibility of exploring other ways of being that arise out of the free interaction of enfleshed individuals in skeins of agape.

I'm sorry I have no items for a list.

This is what you're looking for. Well worth the effort and Taylor has a nice dry wit.

The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist

A Secular Age, Charles Taylor

Reasons and Persons, Derik Parfit

If atheists such as Nietzsche, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek have it right, it's the atheist who has trouble escaping the Christian world view, both in ontology and ethics. Of course, the masterwork on this is Charles Taylors' The Secular Age.

As to more practical questions, modern human rights is based in theism (see Declaration of Independence) and many contemporary philosophers deny the existence of human rights (now that theism has been removed). If anyone is unfamilar with this, I recommend listening to an overview lecture "Human Rights vs Religion?" from the Euhiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University.

This doesn't answer your question about my decisions, but it answers the question of why atheists have similar worldviews to Christians. It's because they've inhereted it. Of course this will get downvoted bit this would be your answer if asked to many atheist academics (and theists, too).