Liturgical Animals in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith

Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith occupy unique terrain among the many genealogists, cartographers, and mission-oriented Christian interpreters of secular modernity. By putting a methodological premium on philosophical(-theological) anthropology and on articulating the conditions—rather than simply the content—of belief in the West today, they approach and elucidate a well-trodden scholarly landscape in new ways. Taylor’s A Secular Age is a monumental, sui generis existential and phenomenological history of the West’s ever-evolving social imaginary, a history whose methodology and anthropological presuppositions merit extensive analysis (undertaken in part 1). In his Cultural Liturgies trilogy, James Smith takes queues from Taylor’s approach and proposes a highly congruous and complementary anthropology to which “liturgy” is the key. His work offers a lexical and hermeneutical toolkit for filling in explanatory gaps in Taylor’s narrative of Latin Christendom’s “secularization”; for further investigation into any particular feature, idea, or practice in said narrative; and for exegeting the numerous ritual and liturgical practices constitutive of every human life, including one’s own (part 2). Despite similar “diagnoses” of secular modernity’s malaise, the two thinkers offer meaningfully disparate remedial “prescriptions.” Part 3 articulates these differences, as they are important for theologians who are discerning the form Christian mission might take in secular modernity. Part 4 considers an apparent asymmetry between Smith’s diagnosis of contemporary Western Christianity’s ills and the correlate prescriptions he suggests the church adopt, as well as issues endemic to Taylor and Smith’s aims to reincarnate the modern, excarnated self. Taylor articulates the otherwise inarticulate and Smith unveils the pedagogical potency of the otherwise ordinary; when read together—especially with Smith as a constructively critical supplement to Taylor—their categories and analyses capacitate a more holistic understanding of what exactly it means to be—and to be the church—in a secular age.