Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been a significant contemporary voice in the fields of political and social theory. Trained at Quebec's McGill University in history, and later at Oxford in philosophy, politics, and economics, Taylor represents what some have called a “postanalytic” perspective, inasmuch as he has questioned the utility of the highly individualistic and intellectualist tendencies that have come to define modern philosophical thought.

Taylor's work, focusing primarily on the relationship between secularization, modernity, and religion, has questioned trends such as naturalism (the assumption that only natural, tangible phenomena may be analytically studied) as well as the classic secularization models (which argue that as societies develop and modernize, they grow more publicly secular, with religion pushed to a more “private” sphere). Instead, in a move very much like William James's “pragmatism” and “radical empiricism,” Taylor has promoted a view of religion and its study that looks to the utility of religious belief in improving social problems such as war and poverty, as well as arguing for the rigorous study of “spirituality” as an important component of human existence. Taylor's work fills an important niche in this present volume as it offers a model of scholarship that many religion scholars today find attractive.

Taylor has received numerous prestigious awards for his work, among these the 2007 Templeton Prize. In addition to his publication of Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (2002), from which the following essay is excerpted, Taylor is the author of several books, which include, among others, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition” (1992), Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), and A Secular Age (2007).