The multi-faceted Charles Taylor (Page 3)

When faced with such a situation, Taylor says, the choices are either to flee altogether or try to promote reconciliation through understanding. He chose the latter. Journalist Gretta Chambers, Taylor's sister and former McGill chancellor, says bridge-building runs in the genes. Chambers and Taylor each have five children. Their brother Geoffrey, who died at 44 in a skiing accident, had four children. The younger generation has married French and English, Jews and Catholics, Protestants and atheists. "We haven't hit a Muslim yet, but it may come," Chambers said. "It leads to a great openness of mind and spirit, I think."

Taylor completed an undergraduate degree in history at McGill in 1952, then went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship for an MA and PhD before returning to teach at McGill in 1961, pulled back by Montreal's cultural allure.

As a young faculty member, Taylor supported students during a 1965 "Day of Action" to protest a tuition hike.

He says it's one of the few places in the world where people can do anything they want -- order a hamburger, take a PhD, go to the theatre -- in two languages. "That's something very special about Montreal which you can never get over if you've had it in your life. You love it," he said. "I was born there, and I wanted to stay there. That's really why I came back to McGill after (Oxford)."

He says McGill has a long history as a home for scholars who make reconciliation and understanding between French and English part of their life's work. Taylor includes in the list prominent Canadian poet and former McGill dean of law Frank Scott as well as former Vice- Principal (Academic) Michael Oliver, chosen by the Pearson government as research director for the 1968 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. "It's no coincidence they chose somebody from McGill," Taylor said of Oliver's appointment. "McGill does offer a certain angle on things, a certain perspective."

Abbey's concluding chapter discusses Taylor's current work, in which he examines the origins of secularism in western society and makes a case for a renewed spirituality. A year ago Taylor delivered the Gifford Lecture series at the University of Edinburgh on these topics, picking up on themes he last touched on at the end of his 1989 book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. There he suggested that purely humanistic, secular sources of inspiration may not be able to sustain important values such as universal benevolence over the long run, and that a return to Judeo-Christian spirituality holds the most promise. It is a position that has earned Taylor many critics who argue -- wrongly, Abbey believes -- that his moral theory collapses without its religious underpinnings. In the Edinburgh lectures, entitled "Living in a Secular Age," Taylor settles on a definition of secular society as one in which many people find religion problematic, and then proceeds to make what Abbey sees as one of his strongest incorporations yet of his religious views into his philosophy.

Taylor says he has tried to do this before, but always felt he had to work through other areas first to get the proper grounding. He wanted to be clear on what has led people to believe that religious spirituality and modern society are somehow incompatible. "For me it's necessary to understand why people are saying what they're saying, even when I don't -- especially when I don't -- agree with it."

Taylor doesn't see a religious revival in the immediate future; the secular forces at work are too strong. They are the same forces that may prevent the work, if and when it appears in published form, from gaining the attention of a sceptical academic audience. But that doesn't stop Taylor from trying to articulate for himself what spiritual richness we might be cutting off in the process.

"Even with that limited audience you can open doors for people, and that's great if you do," Taylor says. "If you open them for yourself and then it opens for other people, that is the greatest satisfaction you can hope for."

Mark Brender is a freelance journalist working in Toronto.