How To Read Complicated Things | Reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

In the theological tribe I identify the most with, the same book keeps showing up. I see it cited in both popular and academic writing, quotes get thrown around in articles, and people name drop the author in podcasts. Charles Taylor and his book A Secular Age is one of the most influential pieces of modern philosophy in the last 20 years. It is a tome. You could hurt a small animal with this book, my wife even warned me to not drop it on our dachshund.

One of the other problems is people joke that no one has actually read it. John Mark Comer referenced this when he joked on an episode of “This Cultural Moment” saying that everyone quotes it but hardly anyone has read it.

Well that sounds like a challenge to me.

I like complicated books…and if this book is so influential into the way my favorite thinkers (and me) are trying to understand our world, then I feel like I need to read it. And it has been a long time since I have read something this complicated, so I am going back to a strategy I learned in seminary when I was getting my Master’s degree. Because I don’t want to just read A Secular Age. I want to finish it. And absorb it. And try to understand why it is so influential.

So I want to share with you 5 ways to read complicated things.

Know What You Are About To Get Into

People often think that reading any book just means opening up and starting it. Yeah - Sometimes. That worked when we were kids pulling out a Hardy Boys novel or Bernstein Bears. Not with a thunder hoss like this book.

BUT!!! If you will think about what is happening, you can do a few things to make sure you make the most of your time. You have to know what you are getting into when you read a book like this. I hate to say it, but you have to have a plan.

What I like to do is grab the book, look at the table of contents. Read through that and try to understand the larger arc and argument of the book. Then I read the first and last section of every chapter…and the headings in between. And go through the whole book like that. I get an idea of what the author wants to say, how they say it, and more of the larger arc of what’s going on. Make a couple of notes. If the same name gets mentioned several times in the intro, go try to figure out who they are and what is unique about them. Focus the light level research on why the author wants to engage with them.

As you do this, do a quick podcast search on the author and see if there are any interviews specifically about the work or book? Give those a listen after you do your quick read of the intro and contents.

Read Lower

Once you understand the bigger picture of the book, its helpful to keep on setting yourself up for success. 

Why? 

Well isn’t it more fun when you know what’s going on?

Reading lower helps you to understand some of the concepts and thoughts in a base level way before you encounter them in a complicated way in the book. 

For me, I’m also reading Jamie Smith’s How Not to be Secular after I do my first glance through Taylor. You might find a book about the author, or an essay anthology. There might be a reader on the author. Flip through that. Go to Wikipedia and learn about how they are, what type of thoughts they are associated with, and read a bit about that. 

You can also do a search of any podcast director or YouTube and see if there are any interviews or lectures by the author that might be helpful. I did a quick dive into both to build out a “listen” list of content that I think might help understanding Taylor more.

Try to gain an idea of what the author is known for and if they have some typical arguments or ideas they are known for. Do a google search and see how blog posts or other articles have interacted with them.

This all sounds a bit laborious…but if you want to finish, and make the finishing worth your while…a little bit of reading before you dive in will let you know what the water is like. 

Read Intentionally

You don’t finish a book like this just picking it up and putting it down. That’s a horrible idea that will lead to you never actually reading it. 

If you want to read a lot of anything, you need a reading schedule anyway. I try to read for one hour in the morning, and I try to make it through a chapter of a book at a time. I’m not sure if that is possible with this A Secular Age, but I will at least try to make it through major sections. And because I went through this book earlier…I know what these are. And since I read lower to get a bigger grasp on the author and how they function, I can also tell when a thought is being wrapped up and I can stop at the end of a section. 

I think reading a book like this is important when we know our mind is at its best and we can focus and pay attention to it. So only you will know what time that is. For me, that is usually early morning. 

So don’t just read absent minded, read with intention. 

Engage, not consume.

Consuming a book is just saying we read it because we turned the pages and we had our eyes in the general direction of the book. We’ve found ourselves doing this before…right? 

Engaging with a book is jumping into the back and forth that is really associated with anything. And you might be thinking about how that isn’t possible with a passive object, but we can. I do this in a couple of ways.

First, I have a reading markup system. I use these colored tabs as I read and notate certain things. I’ve got a key that I always use, so orange means the same in each book I read. I write it in the front of the book, and as I read, as I mark it up, I leave tabs on the book in places I decide. The color tells me in the future what I am coming back to. And I’ve started using both of these purple colors in physical books to notate what I want to put into Readwise, a fantastic tool for reading. 

I also take and keep notes. This takes all sorts of different forms, but for me I usually end up drawing things out and all sorts of other notes that really only make sense to me. This helps me relate the content to other things I am reading as well as make notes for the future. I’m reading this book because I see it as important enough to the wider way that I think, preach, and teach…so hopefully it will be relating to other things. 

Wrap it up

So to make sure you are truly engaging and moving this book into our psyche…share about it. Tweet quotes, begin integrating it into what you are already doing, talk about it with others, that sort of thing. You can find mine on this book with the hashtag #readingcharlestaylor on twitter.

And after I finish it up, I will set it down for a couple of weeks. Then I will take all of the notes and markups and transfer them into Readwise. That sticks them in Evernote, and then I will go into that note and add pictures of my charts and whatever other things I think are valuable. 

So that’s how I read a complicated book. This is an undertaking…and to be honest, we don’t read many books like this. But there are bits and pieces of it that can affect the way we read every book and how we synsethize what we do read and how we share it with other. Come follow the hashtag with me as I take the next couple of months to go through Charles Taylors “A Secular Age”