I first heard mention of Charles Taylor via Charles Guignon’s book in the Thinking in Action series – ‘On Being Authentic‘.
And then read this article in The Guardian:

Is that all there is? | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

Secularism, he charges, has left us leading hollow, atomised lives, devoid of what he (to my mind bafflingly) calls “fullness”. To be sure, Taylor allows that some atheists find “fullness”, by which he may mean human dignity and meaning, in the absence of a comprehensible God. Camus, for instance, suggests in his writings that this sense of humans facing a meaningless, hostile universe and rising to the challenge of devising our own rules of life can be inspiring. It may even serve to fill the God-shaped hole Taylor sometimes implies lies in the atheist’s breast.

This sounds reasonable on a number of fronts, not least the increasingly benign environment we are able to confine ourselves within. Now that we’re no longer so overwhelmingly pressured by the trials of life, we don’t have to dole out miasma (pollution) to regain a sense of autonomy (for more on this see the excellent ‘The Greeks and the Irrational‘ by E R Dodds).

For more on A SECULAR AGE, see Robert Bellah’s post at immanent frame