Legal Commentary

A lovely and important book has come out -- a response to Charles Taylor's magisterial work A Secular Age.  The book is called Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun.  It contains a variety of responses to and critiques of Taylor's wonderful book, and an afterword by Taylor himself.  I found this quote from Taylor especially powerful, and I use it near the end of the book project I'm working on right now, which is titled Constitutional Agnosticism.  Here it is:

[W]hat we badly need is a conversation between a host of different positions, religious, nonreligious, antireligious, humanistic, antihumanistic, and so on, in which we eschew mutual caricature and try to understand what ?fullness? means for the other. . . . [I]t?s possible to build friendship across these boundaries based on a real mutual sense, a powerful sense, of what moves the other person. . . . We?re in the business of friendship, which incorporates the kind of understanding where each can come to be moved by what moves the other.

Both books are well worth reading.  May I note that the section program for the AALS Law and Religion program at next year's annual conference will be titled "Law and Religion in a (Post-) Secular Age."  I hope everyone will attend.  I'm happy to think that we may contribute to bringing Taylor, his ideas, and the larger social condition to which he speaks deeper into the law and religion conversation.