Charles 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 book 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.