Taylor on Secularism

This is a belated response to the recent post discussing Jacoby on Secularism. Listed under my name in the articles sidebar is a review of Charles Taylor's recent book, "Modern Social Imaginaries," which will be pulished in COMMONWEAL shortly. Taylor's great subject in this book, as in his others, is modernity and its malaises. He grapples with the meanings of the "secular" and "secularism" throughout his work, and in a far more nuanced way, apparently, than Jacoby. Here's the first paragraph of my review, to give you a taste:

Charles Taylor is our leading interrogator of modernity. In a series of important books, he has
carefully teased out modernity's origins, its character, and the moral dilemnmas it presents. A
critic as well as an interrogator, he uncovers the spiritual flatness, instability, and atomism
at the heart of our secular age, and urges retrieval of ways of understanding the world, and the
place of the individual in it, that Western culture has lost. Taylor, however, is no neotraditional
romantic about the past. His quarrel with modernity is a lover's quarrel. He finds much about it
ennobling and hopeful, as well as much that is debasing. His work is a call for understanding and
realizing a fuller range of human possibilities within the moral order of what he calls the modern
social imaginary: our common understanding of what legitimates our social arrangements.

One of the puzzles about Taylor, however, is understanding precisely where he stands on religion. I speculate a bit about that at the end of my review:

[I]n Taylor's terms the Catholic sacramental imagination, filled as it is with intimations of eternity,
is profoundly antimodern. In the Catholic worldview, the miraculous is always present in the
quotidian, even if elusively. The Catholic sacramental imagination has remained "enchanted,"
seeing each soul embedded in the communion of saints, and flourishing not just in ordinary time,
but in sacred time with all the souls that have gone before. [Note: Taylor describes the modern,
secular world as "disenchanted."] Taylor does not write as a believer in this book, but in his call
for retrieval of a useable past he implicitly calls for a new social imaginary in which the individual's
horizons are not limited by the radical individualism, rational instrumentalism, and spritual
flatness of the modern, secular world. "Modern Social Imaginaries" leaves the reader wanting to
know more about how Taylor might imagine an alternative to modernity, but perhaps it would
look something like the enchanted Catholic social imaginary that has found a way to resist the
radical claims of modernity while remaining part of the modern world.

Responses from Taylorites welcome.

-Mark