How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

The hints of this become almost shouts in a posthumously published story, “All That.” In it, a precocious young boy is fascinated by the fictive “magic” of a toy cement truck — a magic concocted merely by his parents saying so. In a Santa Claus–like fib, the parents tell the boy that the cement truck’s mixer moves, but only when he’s not looking. Impossible to confirm (since seeing it would stop it), the grown-up narrator looking back on this episode identifies the longing: “As an adult, I realize that the reason I spent so much time trying to ‘catch’ the drum rotating was that I wanted to verify that I could not. IF I had ever been successful in outsmarting the magic, I would have been crushed.”