Democracy and religious diversity

Western societies have undergone an expanding process of religious and spiritual pluralism, due in good part to the development of individual freedom and also as a result of migrations. All of this means that the role and significance of secular states in the west have radically changed: more and more states need to try to find norms to manage a society in which spirituality, religious or otherwise, is very diverse. Some western countries have been slow to take account of this change, an oversight which has had negative and dangerous consequences.

Charles Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, and one of the world’s leading scholars in the domains of political theory, moral philosophy and philosophy of social science. His ideas have had a major impact in the task of conceiving how the contemporary liberal state can manage the plurality of religious and cultural communities which exemplify it. This lecture is to be given on the occasion of the publication in Spanish of one of his key works, A Secular Age (La era secular, Gedisa, 2014 - 2015).

Presented by Neus Torbisco, lecturer in Philosophy of Law at the Pompeu Fabra University.