William T. Cavanaugh and Charles Taylor On Western Secularism: A Critical Comparative Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to instigate a dialogue between theologian William T. Cavanaugh and philosopher Charles Taylor on the topic of Western secularism. Both criticize what Cavanaugh calls the “myth of religious violence,” that is, the idea that the modern liberal nation-state emerged as an indispensable bulwark against religious war and violence. Under this general agreement, however, there are profound rifts when it comes to their understanding of modernity and secularization. The paper is divided in four sections, retracing step by step the argument deployed in the four chapters of Cavanaugh’s influential book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (2009). The respective themes of these chapters are (1) the distinction between religious and secular violence, (2) the underlying dichotomy between religion and the secular, (3) the European wars of religion, and (4) the ideological function of the myth of religious violence, which raises the deeper question of the modern secular state’s legitimacy. On all counts, the challenge is to sort through the authors’ agreements and rifts so as to allow the most significant points of contention to be properly focused.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".