Where is the sacred imaginary in these secular times?

Charles Taylor is one of the world’s most significant social philosophers. Nicholas Smith calls him ‘the leading analytic exponent of Continental philosophy’. Taylor’s book A Secular Age, developed from his Gifford Lectures, is an essential treatise for understanding our times. Taylor’s approach is highly cross-disciplinary, drawing on philosophy, history, sociology and Catholic theology. Despite his vast range of philosophical influences and orientations – his analytical training, his interest in political philosophy and multi – culturalism, and his theological orientation – Taylor has a unified philosophical project. Central to this project is Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s insight that ‘because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning’. This meaning is more than some pure Cartesian con ceptual sense, beginning with an abstract agent or a head-stuck-ina- stove ‘I think; therefore, I am’. Instead, it comes from humans having to grasp the world, to act in it, and to morally reflect upon those acts. So, for Taylor, we are not merely self-meaning making beings – though he starts here – but also meaning mirroring beings, reflecting reality back to ourselves. This is a self-conscious and self-critical process in globalised ‘cross-pressured’ societies, influenced by cross-narrated, meaning-seeking and acting beings searching for fullness, whether religious or secular, transcendent or immanent. Taylor ultimately sees us as embodied beings, part of a bigger body – the body of Christ – expressed in trinitarian communion.