Charles Taylor and the Return of Theology‐as‐history

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Notes

¹ Taylor is not entirely at fault here, of course, as the leading encyclopedia dealing with things non‐religious calls itself The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007), although see the article by Bill Cooke (‘Unbelief as a Way of Life’, 772–5) which questions this usage.

² A. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism (London: Rider, 2004). This book is even less well researched than Taylor’s is, demonstrating familiarity with virtually no atheist thinkers apart from Marx and Freud.

³ On Eliade, see R. Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).

⁴ Taylor’s sharpest barbs are directed at post‐modernist and anti‐humanist thought, rather than against exclusive humanism.

⁵ P. Kurtz, The Fullness of Life (New York: Horizon Press, 1974).

⁶ A Secular Age is strongly reminiscent of Toynbee’s book An Historian’s Approach to Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), another work that began life as Gifford Lectures (1952–3).

⁷ P. Geyl, Encounters in History (London: Fontana, 1967 [1963]), 297. Geyl also noted Toynbee’s habit of representing his adversaries as more naive than they actually are, ‘after which he can deal with them more easily’ (Encounters, 280).