Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In the last 15 years or so, Charles Taylor's work has taken something of a religious turn.1 The phrase 'religious turn' refers not only to an interest in religion as a social or historical force but also to the fact that Taylor has become more explicit about his own religious faith and the ways in which it influences his thinking. The first manifestation of this religious turn comes at the end of Taylor's 1989 work, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity . While the book as a whole demonstrates a scholarly interest in religion and underlines the importance of theism as a source of the modern self, at the end of Sources Taylor worries about the future of one of the major strands of the modern identity -- the ethic of practical benevolence. This ethic is a belief that modern people should do as much as they can to minimize or relieve unnecessary human suffering wherever and whenever it occurs.2 By its very nature, the ethic of practical benevolence is insatiable, and Taylor doubts whether purely secular formulations of the good involved in this ethic, such as the belief in universal human equality and the dignity of each individual, can suffice to motivate people to go on striving to meet its massive demands. He suspects that the strongest source for this ethic is a religious one. According to the doctrine of divine affirmation, as creatures of an all-loving God, all humans are worthy of respect, and in evincing respect for our fellow human beings, we are participating in God's unconditional love for them (Taylor, 1989, 515-518).
Both the role Taylor accords to theism in the shaping of the modern identity and his more confessional remarks about religion have proven to be very controversial aspects of his work. Some commentators discern in them a thinly-veiled ambition to vindicate religious belief and reinstate it to a central place in moral life. Taylor responds by reminding his readers that his remarks about theism's unrivalled power as a moral source are put forward as a 'hunch', tendered as a suspicion rather than a fully-fledged argument (Taylor, 1989; 517-518). However, he has had to re-issue this reminder (Taylor, 1991a, 240: 1994, 125) and...