Charles Taylor in conversation with Lonergan and Doran: On upper and lower blades

A recent attempt to run a conference on the work of Charles Taylor in Australia brought his impressive corpus of writings to my attention. A colleague of mine had challenged a presentation I had given on which I drew heavily on the work of Robert Doran by suggesting that Taylor presented a better account of the problem I was examining. That problem concerned the long term falling away of belief in the provability of God’s existence, and my analysis drew on Doran’s notions of cosmological and anthropological cultures. 1 My colleague’s challenge and the looming possibility of a specialized conference on Taylor’s work led me to begin the task of reading Taylor’s then major work, Sources of the Self. 2 I was even more interested when his most recent work, A Secular Age, which more directly addresses the sort of issues I had raised in my presentation, emerged.