A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

 I bought Charles Taylor's A Secular Age more or less when it first came out in 2007.

Until recently, I'd just dipped into the book if I'd wanted or needed to look at anything specific. However, now I find myself reading it from cover to cover and the book is absolutely fascinating.

I'm now 100 or so pages into the book, which is kind of telling the story of the change in Western human consciousness from the Catholic worldview of the year 1500 up to the exclusive humanist ideologies of the contemporary world, and how we got there. In other words, the book is showing in massive philosophical and theological detail how medieval people were porous selves open to the magical enchantment of the external world, and how over the last 500 years, people have come to be buffered/ more introverted selves lacking in piety and enchantment. 

So far, Taylor has shown how the growth of the mendicant orders; pre-Reformation unrest; the Reformation; the Counter-Reformation; the detachment of nature/science from religiosity/theology etc. gradually contributed to the growth of what would become the contemporary, buffered, materialist mind. One thing that I found especially interesting is that animals were allowed inside Catholic churches before the Counter-Reformation. Of course, I can't wait to read the rest of the book.