Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor is one of the foremost thinkers on secularisation in the world today. In the first of three articles on the debate about the place of Christian belief in modern culture, he talked to Catherine Pepinster about the rejected secular experiment in his home province of Quebec and why he is so enthusiastic about contemporary societyHis emails were terse and to the point. “Of course!” “Yes.” “OK!” “See you then.” And they were ­certainly different from the books – 624 pages of Sources of the Self, a ­whopping 800 for A Secular Age. What would make a man, so eloquent when it came to trying to understand what it means to be a human being or to analyse modernity and its ­secularising forces, quite