New-time religion

Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited.
By Charles Taylor. Harvard University Press, 144 pp., $19.95.

Among widely influential philosophers today I can think of only two who are self-professed practicing Christians: Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, both Roman Catholics. Like MacIntyre, Taylor is unusually knowledgeable about the social sciences (he has taught in a political science department) and is primarily concerned with the intellectual, ethical and religious meaning of modernity. Like MacIntyre, he is an indispensable companion for Christians who would make sense of the world in which we live, and he has deeply influenced my own work.

Taylor's usual method is to publish a major treatise and then follow with a brief book that makes his argument available to a wider audience. He followed his major opus Hegel (1975) with the much more accessible Hegel and Modern Society (1979). His magisterial Sources of the Self (1989), tracing the historical origins of the modern notion of the self, was followed by The Ethics of Authenticity (1992). But on this occasion Taylor has reversed his usual practice and published the smaller book first. The larger book, on which he is still at work, grows out of his 1999 Gifford Lectures and is concerned with the question "What does it mean to call our age secular?" Varieties of Religion Today is a brief meditation on that question, central for understanding modernity, and takes as its point of departure the work of William James, particularly The Varieties of Religious Experience (James's own Gifford Lectures).