ABSTRACT
Charles Taylor begins his latest epic exploration, A Secular Age, with a question: what has happened to the conditions for believing such that in 1500 it was almost inconceivable to think that God did not exist, whereas by the year 2000 it is inconceivable to think God’s non-existence is not one of the possibilities?1 What changes in the conditions for believing have facilitated our current widespread secularism? His examination of the great disembedding and the transformation of the social imaginary extends over eight hundred pages and concludes with an important reflection on the conditions for believing. I set myself a similar if more limited task. It is limited in time because I want to treat a change in believing that has occurred since the 1970s and it is limited in method, being less historical (diachronic) and more philosophical or theologico-philosophical (synchronic). I also want to examine a distinction between an act of believing and an act of faith. So, rather than the conditions for believing, I wish to uncover the structures of believing that will eventually facilitate a phenomenology of believing – but I only propose the grounds for that in this chapter. The focus of my exploration is the work of the Jesuit social theorist, Michel de Certeau.
