Over the course of the last several years, there has been a renewal of attention to religion’s public significance. Religion has become a more important dimension of national and international politics, an increasingly contentious cultural force, and the subject of sustained debate within multiple public spheres.

This is explored in this SSRC Roundtable with Charles Taylor. Taylor's early texts helped me to overcome my adherence to positivism, whilst his early book on Hegel enabled me to make the transition to continental philosophy and Hegel. I later read Sources of Self, which explored the modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason.

Conservatives interpret this strand modernity in terms of a mere subjectivism that leds to nihilism. These critics argue that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this argument, as he argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.

Taylor's argument is modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good--- the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth.