From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: a Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 Hiding grows out of Mr. Taylor's conviction that the more our lives are lived virtually, the more intent we are on affirming the real. He finds his evidence in the surfaces of bodies and things. One chapter is on body art, piercing, and tattooing. Another is on contemporary fashion. Each of the chapters is designed differently, even with varying paper stocks and typefaces. Day-Glo illustrations sometimes overwhelm the text; chapters run into each other; beginnings and endings are murky. Only in the last chapter does Mr. Taylor sum up. There he gives credit to the contemporary critical theories that have called into question the binary oppositions upon which modern life rests: nature versus culture, surface versus depth. But the impulse to deconstruct, he finds, has led to a philosophical dead end. Instead, he looks to Hegel and to information theory to explain postmodern culture. Hegel's "philosophical reconciliation of opposites" and the new technologies that make up virtual culture have something crucial in common, Mr. Taylor argues. Networks, webs, and interfaces are not hierarchical. They do not operate according to the model of the center and the periphery. "This recasting of differences as interfaces creates new interpretive and critical possibilities," he writes. Chicago published many of Mr. Taylor's earlier works, which were among the first to apply deconstruction to religious texts and then to the culture at large. But Hiding goes several steps further. "I've come to expect him to be always on the move," says Alan Thomas, his editor. "I'm used to being surprised by Mark." In photographs, Mr. Taylor looks like everyone's favorite young professor, the guy in the back of a class snapshot who seems only a few years older than the students. He is still lean and youthful-looking in faded jeans, a denim shirt, and clogs. From the neck up, though, the 52-year-old man shows up. The longish hair is now silver, and carefully combed back. The once-bushy mustache is trim. Ten years ago, he was diagnosed with diabetes. He has written about the ailment obliquely, in a chapter in Nots on "the betrayal of the body." In Mr. Taylor's writing, religion has always been about grappling with loss. Lately, the losses he has dealt with have been more direct, less abstract, and his writing has followed. In Hiding, he talks about how his correspondence and growing friendship with the novelist Paul Auster became intertwined with the deaths of his parents and of Edmond Jabes, a French writer whom both he and Mr. Auster admired. In an essay in About Religion, he writes about a sister who died before he was born. In the same essay, he talks about the "indifference" with which so many books are met. His own have a comparatively large readership, selling at art-museum bookstores as well as in more-traditional places. His earlier work on religion is still taught in religious-studies courses. His later work is read at cybercafes.