Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor

Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, whose title is inspired by Charles Taylor's magisterial A Secular Age, offers a host of expert analyses of the religious and theological threads running throughout Taylors oeuvre, illuminating further his approaches to morality, politics, history, and philosophy. Although the scope of Taylors insight into modern secularity has been widely recognized by his fellow social theorists and philosophers, Aspiring to Fullness focuses on Taylor's insights regarding questions of religious experience. It is with a view to such experience that the volumes contributors consider and assess Taylors broad analysis of the limits and potentialities of the present age in regard to human fullness or fulfillment.

The essays in this volume address crucial questions about the function and significance of religious accounts of transcendence in Taylors overall philosophical project; the critical purchase and limitations of Taylors assessment of the centrality of codes and institutions in modern political ethics; the possibilities inherent in Taylors brand of post-Nietzschean theism; the significance and meaning of Taylors ambivalence about modern destiny; the possibility of a practical application of his insights within particular contemporary religious communities; and the overall implications of Taylors thought for theology and philosophy of religion. Although some commentators have referred to a recent religious turn in Taylors work, the contributors to Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age examine the ways in which transcendence functions, both explicitly and implicitly, in Taylors philosophical project as a whole.