released 12/5/2025
Philosopher James K. A. Smith sees his vocation partially as a “translator” of philosophy for wider audiences. In May 2014, he gave a lecture exploring key elements of Charles Taylor’s understanding of what it means to live in a secular age. Summarizing and illuminating Taylor’s vast work, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007), Smith shows how a secularist account of secularism is theoretically inadequate because it cannot account for certain phenomena common to human experience. He describes five aspects of Taylor’s more capacious account of what it means to live in the “immanent frame” of a secular world. Smith is the author of How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Eerdmans, 2014).
This lecture is provided courtesy of Anselm House.
43 minutes
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