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PNEUMA 40 (2018) 5–16
The Work of Charles Taylor and the Future of Pentecostalism
L. William Oliverio, Jr.
The School of Urban Missions Bible College and Theological
boliverio@sum.edu
Abstract
Charles Taylor has been one of the most significant philosophers in the Western world for the past four decades, and his work on secularism and religion in the late modern world has been a major contribution to contemporary philosophy and religious stud- ies. Taylor’s visit to the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Theology in St. Louis has led to responses to his work in relationship to Pentecostal Theology. Taylor’s narration of the secular, culminating in his major work A Secular Age, in relationship to his wider philosophical works has led to the responses in this issue of Pneuma. This introductory article frames Taylor’s work in relationship to these responses to his work from leading and emerging scholars of Pentecostal Theology.
Keywords
Charles Taylor – Pentecostalism – secularism – late modern
A century into modern pentecostal history, and less than a half century into that of the Society for Pentecostal Theology, one of Western civilization’s great- est living philosophers attended the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society, which took place March 9–11 at the Marriott Airport Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. At the invitation of Dale Coulter, the Society’s President and at the time First Vice President and Program Chair, Charles Taylor participated in two sessions and kindly engaged in conversations and meals with Society members, especially taking time with graduate students, over the course of two days. Not only a lead- ing philosopher on the role of religion in the modern world but also a practicing Catholic, Taylor—whose work has seemed quite attached to religious interests
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001006
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by the standards of secular philosophers, and quite philosophical among many in the theological and religious studies guilds—crossed himself and prayed with others over meals, and listened attentively to others during his two-day stay.
Taylor participated in and was the focus of two of the Society’s sessions. The Friday evening, March 10 plenary session was a ninety-minute panel discus- sion, “Our Secular Age: A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” in which Coulter, Michael Wilkinson, and I discussed Taylor’s landmark volume, A Secular Age, followed by an open microphone for questions and further discussion with Society members.1 In the Saturday morning session, sponsored by the Philos- ophy Interest Group of the Society, papers from Wolfgang Vondey, Michael McClymond, and Michael Wilkinson provided formal responses to Taylor’s work.
Merely the most noted work of the career of a major philosopher, which includes authorship or coauthorship of thirty-three books and hundreds of chapters and articles, Taylor’s winding historical story of the becoming of our secular age has itself gained traction since its 2007 publication by Harvard’s Belknap Press.2In 776 pages,ASecularAgeprovides a recalibration of the emer- gence of secularity in three senses in Western or, as Taylor sometimes puts it, North Atlantic culture: in the first sense, where public life and government have been secularized, with public rationalizations supposedly drawing on rational- ities only internal to their domains, without reference to God or religion; in the second sense, in the falling off of religious belief and practice in Western culture; yet, A Secular Age especially takes aim at a third sense, in the deep sociocultural conditions of belief. This third sense of the secular is the primary focus of this work. He puts it this way:
The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but
1 A Secular Age(Cambridge,MAand London: Belknap Press, 2007). A more succinct version of
Taylor’s thick description of the development of the secular and religious in the modern West
can be found in his “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent
de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 178–244.
2 The University of Notre Dame keeps an updated bibliography of Taylor’s works and works
on Taylor, managed by Dr. Bradley Thames, which can be found at https://www3.nd.edu/
~rabbey1/index.htm (accessed February 20, 2018).
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there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.3
A key purpose of the dialogue, then at the Annual Meeting and now in this issue of Pneuma, is to bring together Taylor’s accounting for our secular age and the religious revival of Christianity that has seen charismatic-pentecostal Christianity soar to over a half billion adherents in just over a century in this same age. In fact, Charles Taylor and the many forms of Pentecostalism have had something quite notable in common here. Both have been narrating differ- ent stories from those told by predominant strands of modernity, and, in doing so, both have sought to testify to a richer fabric, even nature, to certain reali- ties than those stories have told, and whose proponents have often expected almost everyone else to live accordingly. Both Taylor and Pentecostalisms have attracted others to their alternative narratives.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is a native of Montreal, Canada. He earned his B.A. in history at McGill University (1952) and was subsequently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, earning a second B.A. from Oxford University in philosophy, poli- tics, and economics (1955) and then an M.A. (1960) and D.Phil. (1961), working under Isaiah Berlin. In 1961 he returned to teach at McGill University, and in his early teaching years he unsuccessfully ran for parliament. In 1974 he moved to teach political science at the University of California-Berkeley. His work Hegel was published in 1975 and has been acknowledged by many as the leading work on the philosopher since.4 In 1976 he became the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, a post that he held until 1981. His Hegel and Modern Society was published in 1979.5 In the 1980s, he held appointments at Queen’s University, Ontario; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India; the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton; again at Berkeley; then Frankfurt; and then Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1985, two volumes of his philosophical writings, predominantly on human agency, language, and the social sciences were published as Philosophical Papers 1 and 2.6 In 1989,
3 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.
4 Hegel (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
5 Hegel and Modern Society(Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
6 Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1985); and Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
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he published his major work on the self in Western culture, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which has become widely regarded as a modern philosophical classic.7
While some scholars in the fields associated with religious studies have sim- ply assumed that A Secular Age is his magnum opus, Taylor’s work on philo- sophical anthropology and philosophy of language as well as ontology has also been monumental, and his major works on these—respectively,Sources of the Self, The Language Animal, and (with Herbert Dreyfus) Retrieving Realism— will long compete with one another for that honor.8Such recognition of other areas of Taylor’s work is found here in this issue of Pneuma, for example, in Caroline Redick’s development of Taylor’s anthropology in relation to a pen- tecostal theology of Spirit baptism and agape, and in Michael McClymond’s recognition and critique of the Hegelian side of Taylor. Still, there are far too many themes in Taylor’s work to account sufficiently for the breadth and depth of his philosophical work in this relatively short series of responses to it in this issue. Among other themes, Taylor’s resourcing of Romanticism for contem- porary philosophy, his development of the understanding of the expressive- constitutive nature of human language, and the retrieval and furtherance of an embodied and pluralistic realism, all major aspects of his overall philosophical project, are largely left unaddressed by the work here.
During the 1990s, Taylor had teaching appointments at Stanford, McGill, Oxford, Frankfurt, and Yale. He published The Malaise of Modernity, also pub- lished as The Ethics of Authenticity, and a major essay on multiculturalism appeared in a 1992 coauthored volume centering aroundTaylor’s essay.9In 1995, another volume of essays entitled Philosophical Arguments was published by Harvard.10In 1999, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh entitled “Liv- ing in a Secular Age,” which marked the beginning of a sustained period of inquiry that led to his major work in this area, which this issue of Pneuma pri- marily addresses.
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Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016); and Taylor and Dreyfus,Retrieving Realism(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991); The Ethics of Authenticity (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Philosophical Arguments(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
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In 2002,Taylor developed some of the content of those lectures intoVarieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited.11 Here this text provides the impe- tus for Comfort Max-Wirth’s essay, which sets in contrast the kind of religious individualism prevalent in the West and the pentecostal symbolism employed publicly in her native Ghana. In 2004, Taylor developed the concepts of the “social imaginary” and the “modern moral order” in Modern Social Imaginar- ies.12 In 2007, Taylor published the culminating work that is our focus here, and what many consider today to be one of the most important books written on religion this century, A Secular Age. Taylor’s philosophical and qualitative accounting for the secular has inspired multidisciplinary responses to it.13And just as Taylor has drawn significantly from the work of social scientists, in par- ticular David Martin and Craig Calhoun, his work has elicited many responses in return from social scientists, such as Michael Wilkinson does in this issue, as he responds with further research and analysis on Taylor’s work on our age as “the age of authenticity.”
Taylor’s accounting for the religious and the secular, along with the fairness and magnanimity his scholarship has embodied, won him the 2007 Templeton Prize for his work in linking scientific understanding to spiritual realities. In 2008, Japan awarded him the Kyoto Prize, the nation’s highest private honor. In 2009, he delivered the Gifford Lectures a second time, on “The Necessity of Secularist Regimes,” at Glasgow. In 2014, the American Academy of Religion awarded him the Martin Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. In 2015, the Library of Congress awardedTaylor and Jürgen Habermas, together, the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. In 2015, the Cana- dian Broadbend Institute not only awarded him their inaugural award in Policy Excellence Research but also named it the Charles Taylor Prize. In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Berggruen Prize for his significance in shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity.
Taylor nevertheless continues to publish. In 2015 he coauthored, with Her- bert Dreyfus, the aforementioned Retrieving Realism, a philosophical defense of a chastened and pluralistic ontological realism set free from Cartesian mod- ernism. In 2016, he published the also already noted The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, in which he draws upon the
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Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Modern Social Imaginaries(Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
The website housed by the University of Notre Dame (see n. 2) contains a secondary bib- liography on works on Taylor’s philosophy, which number in the dozens annually.
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German Romantics to bring to fruition his earlier workdevelopingconstitutive- expressive theories of language as primary over those which first recognize the designative-instrumental uses of language.
Yet, among scholars of religion and theologians, and perhaps altogether, A Secular Age has naturally garnered the most interest. As Michael Wilkinson points out later in this issue,Taylor’s work filled a lack in qualitative thinking on the development of Western secularism. It is not, however, that we are without literature assessing and addressing, and otherwise evaluating, the secular. It is that we have not yet had the philosophical and historical account that might provide such a thoroughgoing account of the secular with this level of philo- sophical depth before Taylor’s.
Taylor’s account begins with the need for explanation. How has the Western (or North Atlantic, as he often suggests as a category) world gone from one in which belief in God was axiomatic just five hundred years ago to where we now are—a situation in which not only that is contested but also in which we have found ourselves with a vast array (which Taylor images as a current “supernova”) of spiritual options in the later chapters of A Secular Age, so that “belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000”?14While his account addresses the rise of secular public and political spaces (Taylor’s sense 1 of the secular) and the rise of religious disbelief (sense 2), his account is primarily of that of the background picture and assumptions that form the gestalt in which we now live (secular 3). He summarizes it like this:
Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understand- ing in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place. By “context of understanding” here, I mean both matters that will probably have been explicitly formulated by almost everyone, such as the plurality of options, and some which form the implicit, largely unfocussed background of this experience and search, its “pre-ontology,” to use a Hei- deggerian term.15
His task was thus to account for the background picture that produced “exclu- sive humanism” as a major and sometimes default option, without making modern secularity “coterminous with exclusive humanism,” as “secularity is a condition in which our experience of and search for fullness occurs; and this
14 15
Taylor, A Secular Age, 13, 25. Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.
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is something we all share, believers and unbelievers alike.”16 His is a complex narration. It will not simply be the rise of exclusive humanism but of dozens of forms of it, and these as met by “antihumanisms” (from Nietzsche to the decon- structionists) and then even ecologically driven nonreligious and nonexclusive humanisms that have arisen amid the modern supernova of beliefs, all of which are variously allying with and countering one another. It is not simply the reli- gious and the nonreligious.There are many spiritual options today, and Taylor’s accounting for the nonreligious leads one to recognize them as also, in at least a more minimal sense, spiritual accounts of the human. Still, a key portion of his task was to account for the rise of a secular age, “one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within a range of an imaginable life for masses of people.”17
Among many scholars of and advocates of religion, Taylor’s account of the secular has been lauded as a thoroughgoing alternative to what he refers to as “subtraction stories,” the set of narratives in which the spiritual world has been disenchanted for us in modernity, now, so that when belief in God and other spiritual beliefs are stripped away we are left with just natural reality. Tay- lor’s analytical and historical narration undermines these subtraction stories by elevating their anthropological and metaphysical assumptions to the sur- face as construals of the human condition, among other construals. Readers would be mistaken, as some anxious for fodder for Christian apologists have been, however, if they came to A Secular Age as a work of Christian or reli- gious apologetics, even as it does some of the work to which many have aspired along those lines. Rather, Taylor’s narrative builds upon his previous work in philosophical anthropology (especiallySources of the Self) as well as his essays on epistemology and hermeneutics.18 In those works, Taylor argues for the supersession of epistemology by hermeneutics. That is, deeper assumptions— particularly anthropological and ontic ones, and what he refers to as “strong evaluations,” that is, our deep moral affirmations—build themselves into this account of secularism. This description might lead readers to think of Tay- lor as a polemicist, but that would be misleading, as Taylor’s narrations are notoriously generous and disarming, with a reputation for describing theories and philosophies with which he disagrees or otherwise does not find com- pelling with fairness and sympathy. At least one reason for this seems to be
16 17 18
Taylor, A Secular Age, 19.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 20.
These are especially found in hisHumanAgencyandLanguage,PhilosophyandtheHuman Sciences, and Philosophical Arguments.
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his understanding of the relationship of language and realism, such that the constitutive-expressive understanding of language as it meets his pluralistic realism considers the philosophical worlds expressed by others as more often than not picturing something worthwhile about human existence, even if some philosophies must, in the end, be refuted for the overall good. Taylor’s own Christian ethics come in to play here in how he deals with the philosophical approaches of others.
Nevertheless, A Secular Age provides a narrative of the becoming of a con- tingent age (the indefinite article might be well noted here) that is not assumed to be the end of history. The story really begins in Latin medieval Christen- dom with the drive for (capital R) Reform. As Taylor narrates it, Reform has not merely been the drive for church reform that led to the Reformation, but a larger current in the West in which the Reformation participated. Rather than seeing it as merely a drive to see nature as it is that leads to the quest for auton- omy and Kant’s sapere aude and all the way to postmodern multiculturalisms, the movement to Reform is a “zig-zag account, one full of unintended conse- quences.” ForTaylor, Reform is a drive.This drive, originally begun among those devoted to God and wanting to see God’s creation further discovered, and the world turned to Christ and society reformed, then led to the cultivation of a drive to make the world over—and to modernity. It came in secular as well as religious forms, and discipline was and is Reform’s chief tool.19
The transition between the movements emerging from the Latin medieval era and then in and through the Reformation era was the providential deism and impersonal order of early modernity. The drive to understand nature and nature’s God led to “a drift away from orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent interacting with humans and intervening in human history; and towards God as architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws, which humans have to conform to or suffer the consequences.”20 Taylor’s account paints a highly nuanced picture here, rarely agreeing with standard straight lines of influence concerning the causality of what has led to formative beliefs, drawing on subtle currents and social influences as well. In doing so, he devel- oped the concept of the “social imaginary” in which social, cosmic and religious understandings are embedded in the “unthought” assumptions of peoples— until they are contested. Nevertheless, though his account provides many sub- tleties, it also painted these larger brush strokes concerning the continuities of
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See especially “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society,” 90–145, chapter 2 of A Secular Age, which is found in PartI, “The Work of Reform.”
Taylor, A Secular Age, 270.
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historical development and the moral and philosophical contestation between orthodox, deistic and skeptical approaches to reality that led to “the fractured culture of the nova.”21
Though present among the elites who had the leisure to investigate and oth- erwise discover life rather than continuously work for personal survival, this fractured culture of the nova more fully arrives inWestern culture after the Sec- ond World War. Rather than Reform, which continues as a drive, this newer age is primarily driven by the “ethic of authenticity,” having originated from forms generated by the Romantics in the modern period even as it has largely pen- etrated popular culture since the 1960s. In the “age of authenticity,” the many options within the modern nova have further exploded into a veritable “super- nova” of spiritual options. This has happened through the unhooking of society and religion in a new era in human history.
Taylor names the overlapping dispensations of the relationship between societies or nations and official or semi-official religions, as they relate to these above developments, in honor of the French sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim.22The paleo-Durkheimian type is where religion is coextensive with society so that, for example, to be French is to be Catholic, or to be English is to be Anglican. Of course, there are minorities in these societies, and all kinds of complexities to these paleo-Durkheimian social forms. Whereas in the paleo-Durkheimian type there was the “demand that people be forcibly inte- grated, be rightly connected with God against their will, this now makes no sense. Coercion comes to seem not only wrong, but absurd and thus obscene.”23 There is then the broader framework of what is acceptable in a culture, as in the longstanding given options at stages of American society, moving from a Protestant framework to later a Protestant and Catholic and Jewish one, both amidsttheneo-Durkheimianframeworkof Americancivilreligion,“onenation under God.” He links this to the era of modern discipline (and the two great world wars), “the age of mobilization,” where Reform and its discipline coa- lesce in major competing, warring movements. Yet, since the 1960s, we have moved toward a post-Durkheimian era in which the injunction is to “let every- one follow his/her own path of spiritual inspiration. Don’t be led off yours by
21 22 23
Taylor, A Secular Age, 299.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 486–492.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 486. Of them Taylor says, “Paleo-, neo-, post-Durkheimian describe ideal types. My claim is not that any of these provides the total description, but that our history has moved through these dispensations, and that the latter has come to color more and more our age,”A Secular Age, 487.
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the allegation that it doesn’t fit with some orthodoxy.”24Theologically, he espe- cially links this ethos to Schleiermacher and experiential liberalism in terms of its grounding in expressivist experientialism, and more broadly he describes it as connected to the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism. Taylor’s typology is notably helpful for understanding current Western social condi- tions, since tensions between the neo- and post-Durkheimian social forms are explanatory of a whole set of underlying social and religious divisions in cur- rent Western societies, even as particular manifestations of these social forms often also embody aspects of its rival social form. In Taylorian terms, they are both in our current “social imaginary.”25
Intheend,forTaylor,amidstthedilemmastherearevariousitinerariesof the “Communion of Saints.” While one can pine away for a previous order, he finds that there is no turning back. He considers the post-Durkheimian the future as we are moving beyond any “perfectly adequate historic order,” and so:
Inevitably and rightly Christian life today will look for and discover new ways of moving beyond the present orders to God. One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding our time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinth landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God.26
In A SecularAgeas well as in the essay on “The Future of the Religious Past” (see note 1), Pentecostalism makes cameo appearances in illustrating the ways in which the line of Christian discipline carried out by Methodists in the late eigh- teenth and the nineteenth centuries, then in other forms of Evangelicalism, but further embodied not only in North American but also in global Pente- costalism in general (the sociologist David Martin’s influence on Taylor might be noted here), has formed disciplinary agents amid the changing environ- ments of the modern world. In this way, they have often carried on a version of the neo-Durkheimian approach, typically aligned with the kind of disciplinary approach characteristic of “the age of mobilization,” while also drawing on the experiential ethos of “the age of authenticity.”27The collection of articles in this
24 25
26 27
Taylor, A Secular Age, 489.
For Taylor’s “social imaginary,” see especially his Modern Social Imaginaries(Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23–30.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 755.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 552–553.
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issue of Pneuma begins, with the aid of Taylor’s philosophical heavy lifting, to explore further the relationship between secularism and the modern world on the one hand and forms of Pentecostalism on the other.
First,WolfgangVondey examines the ways in which Pentecostalism has been an outlier for Western secularization theories as he addresses the underlying conditions of belief, Taylor’s third sense of the secular as he examines meta- physical disenchantment and pentecostal spirituality, and the matters of philo- sophical anthropologies, cosmology, and time. Vondey contends that Pente- costals operate with different mechanisms as alternatives to the normal secular ones that Taylor has identified, and then draws upon the notion of the play of the divine and the world for explanation of what is at work in these areas for Pentecostalism.
Caroline Redick presses into Taylor’s work in philosophical anthropology, especially hisSources of the Self. Redick picks up on Taylor’s discussion of deep moral sources in relation to the inwardness of moral resourcing and the dynam- ics between this inwardness and the external resourcing that comes from tran- scendence. For Christians, this most often amounts to the grace of God. Redick works with Taylor’s approach here to account for and further resource, or “retrieve,” in her iteration of it, agape as a moral source for pentecostal the- ological ethics, as she develops this through the Seymourian vision of Spirit baptism found in current pentecostal theology. She especially finds fruitful the work of Frank Macchia and Amos Yong in connecting Spirit baptism andagape for integrating pentecostal theology with Taylor’s resourcing of moral sources. Redick goes on to articulate tongues-speech as “one way of articulating agape in a language of personal resonance.”
Michael McClymond then provides an appreciation of Taylor’s accomplish- ments in A Secular Age while also contending for a cautious approach to the use of Taylor’s project for Christian orthodoxy, on the grounds of its underly- ing Hegelianism. Taylor’s style of doing philosophy is notably historical, often blending then pulling apart the descriptive and prescriptive in his “best account epistemology” in which his historical narration sets up his philosoph- ical conclusions. While in his recent works Taylor credits the Romantics and their approach to language as a key resource for him in his methodology, his earliest philosophical work, as previously noted, was focused on Hegel. McClymond finds this important for addressing Taylor’s account of the secu- lar here, and he evaluates this underlying approach from a theological vantage point. McClymond thus represents a line of response to Taylor from some cir- cles in Christian theology that address questions of the adequacy of underlying influences on Taylor’s philosophy for Christian thought while also appreciating its value.
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The issue then makes a turn to sociology of religion with articles from Com- fort Max-Wirth and Michael Wilkinson. Max-Wirth provides a contrast case to Western secularism based on her research on the use of religious symbols in Ghanaian federal politics. While Taylor has accounted for the development of religion today in line with the individualistic emphasis on religious experience foreshadowed by the work of William James, West Africa provides a different example of the relationship between religion and society.28Max-Wirth’s article reports on the ways in which pentecostal symbols predominate in Ghanaian politics as they have been utilized in political discourse, campaign songs, and associating politicians with religious identifications, as well as ways in which a strategy of negatively identifying political opponents with African traditional religions has been used in this set of socioreligious conditions that differ from the typical Western. Thus she raises issues that might be evaluated, in Taylorian terms, in relationship to a non-Western “social imaginary,” and that perhaps raise the question of potentially different Durkheimian social forms or at least different variations thereof.
Wilkinson caps off the collection by addressing a predominant topic in the contemporary Western “social imaginary” when he brings Taylor’s qualitative notion of the “age of authenticity” into conversation with recent social science research on expressive individualism as it relates to developments in evangeli- cal and pentecostal Christianity in the late modern context. Wilkinson focuses on the sacred self in an age of consumption and relates Taylor and social sci- ence research to the rising rates of areligiosity among the “nones.” Wilkinson brings the discussion of Taylor’s philosophical narration home to readers famil- iar with the contemporary Western religious situations for which Taylor has provided this long and winding historical excavation.
Forty years into the history of this journal, nearly a half century into that of this Society, and a little more than a century after the coalescence that became modern Pentecostalism, the dialogue that takes place in this issue represents a coming of age for Pentecostalism. The (perhaps) leading philosopher in the Western world accepted an invitation to participate in our 2017 Annual Meet- ing, and Pentecostals today have a growing group of scholars who are engaging the wider scholarly world with pentecostal thought and thought about Pente- costalism. Perhaps this will one day be seen as coming to mark a moment of emergence into intellectual maturity for pentecostal scholarship as the pente- costal mind catches up to its enormous heart and spirit.
28
Taylor,Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited.
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