As I walked out of the Palais and back into the bitter snow and wind, I chatted with a young woman who is finishing her last year at the Université de Montréal. “When I hear someone speaking bad French, I feel offended,” she told me, echoing a sentiment expressed over and over during the course of the hearing — that immigrants need to learn French properly, that they need to appreciate the richness of Québécois culture, that they need to integrate. At first, this seemed to me wholly inconsistent with a diverse, multicultural, multi-religious society, and perhaps even racist, but then it struck me that in a secular society it is precisely these kinds of cultural baselines that make genuine diversity possible. Differences in cuisine and colour are neither deep nor interesting and are less and less relevant in our global society; differences in spiritual outlook are. The sweeping strength of A Secular Age rests in its great openness to human possibility, its often moving insistence that there is something more to human life than mundane happiness, a decent job, and a nice house, that we hunger for a source of meaning and goodness that transcends our individual lives. That each of us needs to search for a higher calling. As at the Palais, in A Secular Age Taylor appears caught between his own transcendent higher calling and the messy exigencies of everyday human life.