(1) the ancients saw the sacred and the secular as one seamless whole (even when they were skeptical about it - Dawkin’s comment about scientists having the edge on ‘believers’ in terms of ‘awe’ surely beckons us to this all-inclusive landscape) - why shouldn’t we?

(2) to polarise (and to polemicise) the discussion is the least interesting thing to do - it is more satisfying (and it is possible) to create a circle of inquiry that allows for all voices to be heard and understood and respected (as the book is already demonstrating despite the criticism that it is a polemical work (I would describe it as ‘exploratory’); and yes, in the arc of inquiry, concessions will be made, because ‘truth’ always lies annoyingly in the middle somewhere in ‘no person’s land’, falling between the stools of the various disciplines - so why should we be surprised?

(3) in my view, life and life experience, critical and self-critical reflections (whether they take place in the laboratory or elsewhere) are all subject to the bar of life and the reality of what life is, and all of us, whether we name ourselves ’secularists’ or ‘believers’, will be judged by it. And all of of us are limited by the constraints imposed by the quality and reliability of our current instruments of mind and measurement and other ‘aids’ that we employ to determine what we think life is all about - so why should we cut ourselves off from speculation, and why shouldn’t we fling open the doors and windows of inquiry where all the best research is going on - in an inter-disciplinary direction? Thank you so much for this site and the valuable interchange of ideas that is taking place here!

“in these, Taylor reveals that in fact this is a theological argument, that indeed the book is an explicit brief for a theological critique of secularism and the immanent frame.”

I would say that this fact does not impugn the book’s value, but in fact bolsters it: the candor is refreshing. And the testimonial or confessional register in which Taylor puts this argument, I think, allows him to (potentially, anyway) steer clear of the obvious pitfalls of hubris or triumphalism.

But Sheehan is surely right to see that the temptation to assume this posture is there, and his annoyance I think stems with the fact that Taylor’s rhetoric at times flirts quite openly with it. Sheehan quotes the key passages here. I can easily see how a secular thinker would feel marginalized by this rhetoric: Christianity defines all the options between corruption and redemption, will be the cure to its own poison, and leaves no room for the potential contribution of other voices.

The question we need to ask is whether Taylor’s book invites or discourages pluralistic dialogue concerning a common cultural need to face and overcome all those pathologies that can be included under the heading “the malaise of modernity.” I can imagine different answers to that question, positive and negative, and Taylor’s oftentimes vexing book invites both. Since Sheehan has argued the negative conclusion so well, let me risk arguing a way in which one can imagine a positive answer to that question.

Let’s imagine that Taylor’s “confession of faith,” which Sheehan admits to finding “moving” (to wit: “a faith in a future where depth and profundity reinvigorate and moderate a shallow, violent, and over-rationalized secular age”), puts an equally significant challenge to believing Christians as it does to secular humanists. As a protestant Christian, I can get past my annoyance over the fact that Taylor’s prophets of this faith are Catholics “to a man,” when I understand the radical and tenuous relationship many of these authors had with respect to the Catholic tradition itself. As I read the book’s final chapter, I was even forced to ask myself, ‘how many Christians seriously and authentically entertain the sort of eschatological vision for human flourishing and healing put forward by Taylor and his heroes?’ I’m afraid the answer is, and hope it is not: not very many. But the challenge to Christians is clearly there.

So Taylor could simply be pointing to resources from his own tradition that allow him to envision a path out of our malaise, and even to testify to the worth of those resources, their teaching potential, without necessarily thereby claiming that nothing can be learned from non-Catholics, or no solidarity established between Catholics and their others. In fact, by carving such a self-critical space within his own tradition, Taylor could even be read as inviting a potential conversation with other non-Catholic critics of secular modernity.

But does the book actually succeed in doing this? Sheehan comes away with a much different conclusion: For Taylor, he says, “Christianity comes to occupy all of the available sites of intellectual responsibility.” If true, that is a serious indictment, and one I’m afraid Taylor’s book on its own merit does little to dissuade. I see this as an unfortunately missed opportunity for building solidarity between those of whatever religious or secular orientation who desire, as much as Taylor does, to re-narrate the story of “Latin Christendom,” and thereby imagine an alternative possibility to its unjust and overbearing actuality.

At first blush, Sheehan’s remarks suggest “no.” Taylor’s discourse can only show up for him as apologetics, a dogmatic species of special pleading for a perspective under siege.

But digging a little deeper, it is clear to me that Sheehan—a very sensitive reader indeed—sets the stage for a fusion of horizons between discourse communities with different hermeneutical standpoints but large common concerns.

Representing the historians’ interest in verifiable historical propositions, and sound historical argument, Sheehan asks Taylor to defend the historical claims in the book, and say why they are not overdetermined by the “anthropological a priori.” A fair question to put to someone like Professor Taylor, who aspires to an argument that satisfies validity-claims in the “human sciences.”

Sheehan also—perhaps unwittingly—sets the stage for a relevant philosophical discourse to enter his own historical terrain, a terrain (as he implies) unaccustomed to unabashed “apriori” argument. Unclear whether Professor Sheehan is aware that—for Taylor—the “anthropological apriori” does not emerge from fideistic belief, a ground bound to look irrational (”apologetic”) to most of us, historians and non-historians alike. On the contrary, from early in his career, Taylor has been advancing a “transcendental argument,” a neo-Kantian style argument that discerning persons can determine the “conditions for the possibility of” the phenomenal world.

A phenomenal world which includes among other things the historians guild Professor Sheehan belongs to: for this reason Sheehan’s interpretation of the intended reach of Taylor’s “anthropological apriori” is to my mind incorrect.

He writes: “one might easily argue that the unbeliever makes very little use of the idea of fullness at all.” One might, but he would be running up against forty year’s of Charles Taylor’s argumentation to the contrary.

Here is an opportunity to see some constructive clash between historian and philosopher on philosophical terrain, terrain so seldom co-inhabited.

Which if we can cut the issue down to size in this way, opens us into a different area entirely, namely inter-ideological dialog, implicitly raised here by Robert Bellah in his brief remarks on “global solidarity” (unfortunately in a somewhat obscure way). These very pressing inter-cultural issues cannot be undertaken in a spirit of this versus that, unless it is humility and listening versus cultural arrogance and solipsism.