12th August 2024: digital purchasing is currently unavailable on Cambridge Core. Due to recent technical disruption affecting our publishing operation, we are experiencing some delays to publication. We are working hard to restore services as soon as possible and apologise for the inconvenience. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Taylor addresses A Secular Age to an ‘us’ identified with the West. In this way the book is particularised and entered into a conversation. It is a prime example of the multiculturalism Taylor acclaims. However the paper argues that the commitment to multiculturalism forces A Secular Age to downplay the importance of Catholicism as an institution. It is contended that the book is a great work of catholicity (small ‘c’) but in need of more Catholicism (capital ‘C’).
1 Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, trans. Weaver, W. (London: Picador, 1982)Google Scholar.
2 Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Let me put my point more assertively. A Secular Age discovers that the processes and implications of secularisation are massively more complex and multifaceted than philosophical narratives have tended to suggest. This is something sociologists have long known. For the most part the book is one more proof of the point that philosophy is – with one or two notable exceptions including Taylor himself in Modern Social Imaginaries and thereforeadmittedly with the exception of a chunk of A Secular Age– remarkably naïve sociologically just as, let me hasten to add, sociology is invariably banal philosophically.
4 These points make it necessary for me to clarify the mode of address of this paper. I have written in the first person in order to highlight how the paper expresses the relationship I built with A Secular Age. I am offering one reading, by one reader, as a contribution to a debate.
5 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans, Parsons, T., second edition (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 13Google Scholar.
6 Jaspers, Karl, The European Spirit, trans. Smith, R.G. (London: SCM Press, 1948), p. 45Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., p. 47.
8 Ibid., 64.
9 Modern Social Imaginaries, op. cit., p. 196.
10 Charles Taylor, ‘The collapse of tolerance’, The Guardian, online ‘Comment is Free’, 17 September, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/sep/17/thecollapseoftolerance.
11 Ibid.
12 Charles Taylor, ‘Charles Taylor Interviewed’, Prospect, no. 143, 2008, Web Exclusive, http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10030.
13 Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism, Expanded Edition: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Ibid., p. 39.
15 Taylor, Prospect interview, op. cit.
16 Taylor, Charles, A Catholic Modernity? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 13–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Page references to Taylor, Charles, ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ are drawn from the version in Heft, James, ed., Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 10–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 My shift from capitalised Catholic to small-case catholic is deliberate and intended also to highlight exactly the same slippage in Taylor's lecture. In his writings Taylor pushes Catholicism as a Church – that is to say Catholicism with a capital C and as an institution with sacraments and a magisterium – very far into the background. Taylor's writings pretty much seem to embrace catholicism (small case) without Catholicism (capital C).
19 ‘A Catholic Modernity?’, op. cit., p. 11.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Modern Social Imaginaries, op. cit.
24 To a considerable degree, albeit by a different route, Taylor here rediscovers the emergence of the ‘secular sphere’ that is mapped in Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar.
25 ‘A Catholic Modernity?’, op. cit., p. 11.
26 Ibid. p. 33.
