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Uplifting Unbelief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Gregor McLennan
Gregor McLennan*
Affiliation:
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 4, Priory Road, Bristol B58 1TY
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article analyses three of Taylor's principal theoretical moves: his basic account of secularity and related rejection of secularist ‘subtraction stories’; his comprehension of historico-empirical realities in the light of a sort of philosophy of history; and his presentation of the transcendental quality of the experience of ‘fullness’. Motivated to contest Taylor's framing of the ‘unbeliever’ as spirituality deprived and intellectually complacent, the coherence, content and rhetorical overkill of his argumentation in each of these areas is questioned.

Keywords

post-secularityrhetoricsubtraction storiestranscendenceunbelievers
Type
Symposium on Charles Taylor with his responses
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 91 , Issue 1036 , November 2010 , pp. 627 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2010 The Dominican Society.

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References

1 Bellah, Robert, ‘The Challenge of Secularism: Is God Absent?’, UDMcast, (Detroit: University of Detroit Mercy, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 Taylor, Charles, ‘Foreword: What is Secularism?’ in Levey, Geoffrey Brahm and Modood, Tariq, eds., Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar.

3 McLennan, Gregor, ‘Spaces of Postsecularism’, in Beaumont, Justin, Molendijk, Arie and Jedan, Christopher, eds. Exploring the Postsecular: the religious, the political, the urban (Leiden: Brill) 2010: 41–62Google Scholar and McLennan, Gregor, ‘The Postsecular Turn’, Theory, Culture & Society, 27(4), 2010: 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See the following works of Gellner, Ernest: Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History (London: Collins, 1988)Google Scholar; and Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 Plough, Sword and Book, op.cit. p. 201.

6 Berger, Peter L., ‘The Desecularisation of the World: A Global Overview’, in Berger, Peter L., ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Michigan: W.B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1999), pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

7 Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Ronald, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Graham, Gordon, The Shape of the Past. A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Unger, Roberto M., The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 49Google Scholar.