Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | P | Public Interest

Postmodern religion. (Review).(Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited)-

Article Excerpt
A PUZZLING aspect of religion in America today is that there is both less and more of it than 40 or 50 years ago. Gone is the recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the start of the school day. Gone are moments of silence in school and clergy-led prayers at graduation. Gone are many of the behavioral restraints imposed by a Christian culture--restraints on dancing, Sunday shopping, abortion, divorce, etc. And gone are the communal bonds that closely tied many individuals to their churches, synagogues, and parishes.

Yet these dramatic cultural shifts have not ushered in the secular age predicted by an earlier generation of sociologists and political scientists. Quite to the contrary. Belief in God and church attendance remain fantastically high in America. (Ninety percent of all Americans say they believe in God, and 64 percent consider religion very important.) Religious opinion continues to shape public debate on a range of issues from abortion to welfare reform to stem-cell research. Home schooling and abstinence education have taken a prominent place in public-policy discussions. Moreover, individual expressions of faith are on the upswing. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he publicly distanced himself from his Catholicism. In contrast, in the 2000 election, George W. Bush, Albert Gore, and Joseph Lieberman all trumpeted their personal faiths. The Lord's Prayer may have been banished from public schools, but it was what Todd Beamer recited just before he led the heroic charge on the terrorists who com mandeered Flight 93.

An insightful, compactly argued new book by Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, (++) can help make sense of these apparently contradictory trends. A Canadian political philosopher, Taylor has written extensively on religion, philosophy, the social sciences, and such contemporary political developments as multiculturalism. He is a religious believer himself (Catholic), and while his best known work, Sources of the Self, was widely acclaimed, it was also faulted by some liberal theorists for being "soft" on religion. Taylor is no conservative, however; in fact, he is usually assigned the party label "communitarian." But labels do not do justice to Taylor, and Isaiah Berlin may have been closest to the mark when he said of him: "He is, in short, a great fertilising force, a creative and original thinker."

TAYLOR describes his latest book, which is based on a series of lectures given in 2000, as an "idiosyncratic and selective" "exchange" with the great American psychologist and philosopher William James. The book is neither a comprehensive account of James's thought, which he notes is unfortunately neglected by most contemporary academic philosophers, nor a close...