Have we made progress in the integration of secular life with the transcendence of faith? A 25 year retrospective on Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity?

Abstract

Twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture [hereafter “Lecture”] at the University of Dayton in 1995 entitled A Catholic Modernity? At the time, it was considered a remarkable assessment of Catholic modernity that was a concise summary of Taylor’s then recently published Sources of the Self (1989). Since then he has moved towards further reflections on faith and religion, as displayed in his master work A Secular Age (2007). The point of this paper is to assess the impact that Taylor’s thesis of Catholic modernity has on the broad dialogue of faith and culture.