Charles Taylor on Ethics and Liberty

The Impacts of Modernity upon Religiosity: A Critical Study of Charles Taylor

The relationship between modernity and religiosity has been in the center of many scholarly debates. Among others, Charles Taylor presents in his works a general picture of the elements that shape the secular age. He starts with the question why people used to be faithful, while they are not easily so in our age. To answer, he explores the past five centuries in the West and coins some terms to...

On Moral Liberty

The Freeman Ideas on Liberty

O n average, Federal Reserve chairmen come and go at about the same rate as U.S. presidents. Dating from the creation of this country's central bank (1913), we have seen sixteen presidents (Wilson to Bush) and fourteen Federal Reserve Chairmen (Hamlin to Bernanke). The Fed Chairmanship, however, has seen more variation in years of service—Franklin D. Roosevelt notwithstanding. Spanning four pre...

Qohelet and the Marks of Modernity: Reading Ecclesiastes with Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often claimed as a harbinger of modernity. In this essay, I compare Ecclesiastes with two overlapping constructions of modernity, taken from Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor, focusing especially on Taylor’s motifs of inwardness, narrativity, meaninglessness, and ordinary life. I suggest that the likeness to modernity in Ecclesiastes is a complex bundle of e...

Gender and the Charles Taylor Case at the Special Court for Sierra Leone