Avenues of Faith

“Charles Taylor has shown that modernity does not erase religion but that it reconstructs it—that it does not prohibit faith, even if it makes its access more complex. Without highlighting or explaining it, this interplay is a fervent plea for reading and intellectual work. It also testifies, with modesty, of the flavor of spiritual life. It shows that one can be a convinced believer and at the same time benevolent.”

“The philosopher Charles Taylor, Christian, known for a remarkable analysis of secularism that he prefers to call 'the secular age' and for a masterful work on the sources of the self, delivers here, in a small work of interviews, the sources of his self! It is a strange trajectory, in fact, which passes from Baudelaire to the gospel, and from Hölderlin to Christianity, not by the marked routes of proofs of the existence of God or theological arguments but by the incandescence of poetic openness and spiritual widening of his interior life by works that were also founding words. This intimate and internal support opens and prepares a dialogue with the signs of the times and the borders of the world. An inhabited book that simply does good.”

“Charles Taylor's book is stimulating in more ways than one. Perhaps it is difficult to see the common points between the five authors who challenged his faith. In the last pages of this book of interviews, Jonathan Guilbault sums up the common thread by saying that all of the cited authors, each in their own way, have in common that they defended freedom against the threat of systems that destroy lives and that translate into injustices.”