How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

It’s a way to deal with the pressure of the loss. Recall the shape of Taylor’s account here: the feeling of loss exerts its own kind of pressure, the strange pressure of an absence. And if that can be felt in the momentous, it can also be felt in the mundane. Indeed, “this can be where it most hurts,” he concedes: “some people feel a terrible flatness in the everyday, and this experience has been identified particularly with commercial, industrial, or consumer society. They feel emptiness of the repeated, accelerating cycle of desire and fulfillment, in consumer culture; the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb”