Our Haunted Age

Charles Taylor looms as a giant on Canada’s intellectual landscape, having stood at the nexus of explosive conversations about multiculturalism and religious freedom (as co-author of Quebec’s 2007 report on cultural and religious accommodation), run for federal office (unsuccessfully) on several occasions and written one of the most celebrated contemporary works of political and social philosophy, A Secular Age. Yet to those outside the niche of political theory, A Secular Age is best known for its dense narrative and inscrutable abstractions. Even among political theorists the book is rarely read, which at nearly 900 pages may give it a place of honour on the “Hawking Index,” a mathematician’s tongue-in-cheek list of famous, notoriously unread books.

So in writing How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, a professor of...