Book reviews: the good, the evil, and the mundane: the place of the sacred in the modern world

It is often claimed that we live in a secular age. But we do not live in a desacralized one. Sacred forms – whether in ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ guise – continue to shape social life in the modern world, giving rise to powerful emotions, polarized group identities, and even the very concept of moral society. In his recent book, Gordon Lynch sets out a theory of the sacred drawing on Durkheim’s work and asks us to develop moral reflexivity, which Eric Taylor Woods finds unconvincing. The Sacred in the Modern World. Gordon Lynch. Oxford University Press, February 2012.