A Conversation with James K. A. Smith

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and join us as we chat with Jamie Smith about his new book How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor [http://www.eerdmans.com/Products/6761...], an intelligent guide to navigating today's culture. If you have further questions for Jamie, feel free to ask him on Twitter (@james_ka_smith) using #HN2BS.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" — it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times.

Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present — a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers.

Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are — whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

*Terms featured in the video are pulled directly from the book's extensive glossary.

Video Credits
Interviewer: Jacob Thielman
Producer, Director of Photography, and Editor: Ahna Ziegler
Production/Camera Assistant: Philip Zoutendam