About the Author: Robert Yelle
Robert A. Yelle, J.D. (Berkeley), Ph.D. (Chicago), is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Hardin Honors Program at the University of Memphis. He is the co-editor of After Secular Law(Stanford, 2011) and the author of Explaining Mantras (Routledge, 2003), and of the forthcoming The Language of Disenchantment (Oxford, 2012) and The Semiotics of Religion (Continuum, 2012).
During the same period that Taylor identified as central to the transition between Christianity and secularism—namely, Deism—we witness an exacerbation of several tendencies that were bound up with the self-definition of Christianity as against Judaism. I will identify and briefly discuss three such tendencies: internalization, universalization, and the critique of heteronomy.