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There's a fascinating discussion going-on in the comments to Sr. Gail's most excellent piece on A Post-Secular Spirituality via the path of Yoga. I raised a question about we understand secularity (and therefore post-secularity). By far the greatest book on secularity I've ever read is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's magnum opus: A Secular Age. In the video above, Taylor speaks about the path of secularity in the United States.
I went back to the introduction to that text and found this passage which reflects interestingly on the discussion Gail has raised in her article.
So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in a third sense, which I could encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others...Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual, or religious experience and search takes place. By 'context of understanding' here I mean both matters that will probably have been explicitly formulated by almost everyone, such as the plurality of options, and some which form the implicit, largely unfocused background of this experience and search. An age or society would then be secular or not, in virtue of the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual. (A Secular Age, p.3)
In this regard, articulating a concept of post-secularity becomes interesting (if potentially quite challenging even perhaps for some problematic). By Taylor's definition of secularism (one in which there is choice and the inevitable acceding to alternative even opposed worldviews), then the proliferation of Yogic spirituality in the West seems to be perfectly compatible with and utterly reflective of secularity.
But more than anything, I'm really interested to hear other's thoughts on this subject. What Taylor does in his book (and Gail has asked us to do in a comment to her own post) is actually feel into our own sense/experience of living in secularity. Both Taylor and Sr. Gail point to the ways in which that inquiry is actually quite challenging--as it is so close to us, particularly what Taylor calls the "implicit background" of our secular condition.
