The Gift We Bring

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith invites religious traditions, especially Christianity, to bring their best elements into the public square in a spirit of hospitality and engagement for the common good. With regard to Christianity, he claims that one of the best elements we can offer the public square is a complexly relational vision of the human person made to love self, others, God. In this essay Dávila proposes that the preferential option for the poor is a particular expression of this anthropological vision of Christianity that is well poised for public engagement based on humility and care for the most vulnerable members of society. Following Volf’s proposal, the option for the poor functions as a paradigm for imaginative and creative engagement in the public square that might help people of faith navigate seemingly intractable political and cultural disagreements in the public square.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

A Public Faith—but for Everyone and Every Public?

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s sets out a strong, good thesis about the freedom religious people ought to have to participate in public as fully themselves, as religious people. This thesis is in tension with the fact that some people seek to harm others, or to radically compromise public life itself, in the name of their religion. Along the way, Volf makes a number of points that seem puzzling, at least overstated, but perhaps even incoherent with other claims he makes or with data that he likely also knows. I raise the possibility that the author’s social location may help to explain at least some of these debatable features of his otherwise salutary book.     

Miroslav Volf on Living One’s Faith

Abstract

In this essay the author reflects on Miroslav Volf’s discussion, in A Public Faith, of Christianity as properly a prophetic religion. The author focuses especially on the two main malfunctions that Volf cites as accounting for the fact that the faith of individual Christians is often not prophetic, namely, what he calls “idleness of faith” and what he calls “coerciveness of faith.”     

A Christian Islamist?

Abstract

In this review, the author discusses Volf’s paradigm from an Islamic perspective, and compares and contrasts some of Volf’s assertions with those of his avowed counterpart: the Muslim fundamentalist Syed Qutb. Some interesting questions are raised, and the differences between these two paradigms, it is claimed, is not as great as what might initially appear.     

Practicing Faith in Public Life

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s book, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, offers a valuable guide to how people of faith can engage in politics by calling on the best of their traditions, holding modest expectations, and remaining nonviolent. From the perspective of Catholic Social Teaching, Volf’s model can be viewed as appropriately, but cautiously hopeful. Yet, given contemporary suspicion of religion in politics, the challenges of acting prophetically in a pluralistic society, and the responsibility of Christians to “be the church,” it may be wise to begin with local actions rather than hoping to change the world by political means.     

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?

Abstract

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europe's wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.     

A Loving Attack on Caputo’s ‘Caputolism’ and his Refusal of Communism

Abstract

For various reasons, John D. Caputo is one of my favorite philosophers. However, one may identify two basic weaknesses or contradictions when it comes to his thoughts on political economy: (1) Caputo insists on capitalism—even if it be a significantly transformed capitalism (what I will be calling here “Caputolism”)—but he does not question whether capitalism can accommodate the required reforms; and (2) Caputo’s refusal to entertain the possibility of communism as a good/better alternative to capitalism, even though he has referred to an earthly “Kingdom of God” composed of a “radical community of equals”—which (strongly) resembles communism, thus rendering his refusal of communism all the more perplexing.     

Heretic or Traitor? Spinoza’s Excommunication and the Challenge That Judaism Poses to the Study of Religious Diversity

ABSTRACT

When political theorists talk about “religious diversity,” they usually intend the multiplicity of “religions” in a given society. Yet we now know that the secular, liberal framing of the problematic presupposes a controversial definition of “religion.” My primary goal, in this paper, is to reorient scholarly discussion around what we might call “the critical religion conception of diversity” – not the multiplicity of “religions,” but the myriad ways that the sacred intersects with national and political identity, some of which resist assimilation to the “religious” paradigm. Toward this end, I relate a story about Spinoza’s Hebrew reception in the interwar period. For Zionist intellectuals, Spinoza symbolized the deformations that “religion” imposed on Judaism’s self-understanding and the constraints that it placed on Jewish intellectual horizons. Studying the Zionist critique of “religion” exposes the limitations of received theoretical frameworks, which cannot address the kinds of diversity that were politically consequential for twentieth-century Jews.     

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O'Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “If people want to go to church and be crazy fools, that's their business. But I don't want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools. … They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest of their mumbo jumbo, as long as they don't interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray's public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century.     

Religion in Habermas’s Two-Track Political Theory

Abstract

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework.     

Faith before Creed: The Private and Public Religion of George Washington

George Washington's religious beliefs have long been debated by scholars, who have insisted that he was anything from a devout Anglican to a Deist. This study argues that he was neither, instead contending that Washington had Latitudinarian tendencies, and that while he believed in God, he was not otherwise particularly religious. As some with Latitudinarian affinities, he showed no preference among varying creeds or forms of worship despite his Anglican upbringing. His personal beliefs also intersected with his stance on public religion. Washington favoured broad religious liberty for Christians and non‐Christians alike, reflecting his Latitudinarianism because he believed that denomination, dogma, doctrine, and creed were insignificant, and that it was up to the individual to decide the best way to worship God.     

International Peacemaking and the Anti-War Movement

Abstract

This paper contends that biblical law provides guidance about the proper configuration of moral goods and evils, which are often incommensurable, rather than offering a “vision of the good.” It argues that the “good” of creation itself comprises a moral order of goods to which there are many proper responses and investigates how such openness, when combined with a focus upon moral goods, intersects with three aspects of Burnside’s argument in God, Justice, and Society, namely, the role of wisdom, the importance of vocation and the significance of God’s grace.     

Public Faith and the Common Good A Radical Messianic Proposal

Abstract

The article inquires into the implications of Christianity not being a religious perspective among others in the contemporary Western debate on religious pluralism. A quick glance at a recent debate in Sweden serves to demonstrate how Christianity, although marginalized in its traditional forms, remains a dominating cultural interpretative scheme that continues to influence the majority’s view on private and public, individual and collective, rational and irrational. Against this background, the author argues, it is imperative that any Christian theologian who engages in the question of religion in the public sphere in the Western world, also must critically confront the question of Christianity’s particular status. Not least in light of contemporary right-wing rhetoric about the West as an exclusively “Christian civilization,” theologians need to reflect on how to avoid articulations of the Christian vision of the common good that manifest themselves at the expense of other religious traditions. The article ends by sketching a possible direction for such reflection.     

Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts

The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper (Waight, 2022), and in Gross and Rutland's Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society (2021). I propose that while this is a valid public policy issue, any originalist argument actually relies upon a singular historiographical argument, namely a “Whig” historiography. However, across historians the meaning of “secular” has actually been evaluated through four different historiographies: a “Whig” progress narrative; economic materialism; critical theory; and a religious/nationalist approach. Maddox, Byrne and Waight's approaches can be characterised within a “Whig” approach to Australian education history, originally found in “The Melbourne School” of Austin and Gregory, and the textbooks of Barcan. Its revival presents a good opportunity to survey the topic of education historiography, assess the “Whig” argument, and to propose that religious/nationalist historiography provides a more accurate interpretation of the original intent of the term “secular.”     

Jefferson's Legacy to the Supreme Court: Freedom of Religion

Except for Rhode Island, each of the thirteen American colonies created some form of established religion. The English venturists who undertook settlements in New England and Virginia simply assumed that religion would be inextricably tied to their colonial enterprises. ¹ The 1606 charter creating the Virginia colony required that all ministers preach Christianity that followed the “doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within the realme of England”—in other words, the Church of England. ² To bolster the struggling Jamestown settlement, in 1610–11, Sir Thomas Dale promulgated “Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martiall for the Colony in Virginia.” Clergymen were to read “Dale's Laws,” as they were labeled, to assemblies every Sabbath. The thirty‐seven rules included eight that specifically referred to God and prohibited impiety, blasphemy, sacrilege, and irreverence toward preachers or ministers. The sixth law was particularly notable for its strict religious requirements and harsh penalties for violations: “Every man and woman duly twice a day … shall … repair unto the Church to divine service upon pain of losing his or her days allowance for the first omission, for the second to be whipped, and for the third to be condemned to the Gallies for six months. Likewise no man or woman shall dare to violate or break the Sabbath by any gaming … but duly sanctify and observe the same, both himself and his family, by preparing themselves at home with private prayer, that they may be better fitted for the public according to the commandments of God and the orders of our Church. …” ³ Colonists faced the death penalty after the third offense of missing morning and afternoon Sunday devotional services.     

Defending Political Augustinianism: Brague and Taubes on the “Divine” as a Common Conceptual Space

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (ho theos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos).     

God,Otherness, and Community: Some Reflections on Hegel and Levinas

Many critics have argued that the alterity of God is negated within Hegel's philosophy of religion. This paper will present the position that Hegel's approach to theology depends on a rigorous hermeneutic which does not negate the meaning and power of religious language and practice as they are found within various Christian traditions, though it does challenge the view that God is absolutely “other” than the human. Further, Hegel's approach to the interpretation of the divine-human relationship need not be limited to Christianity alone. Although Hegel regards Christianity as the highest, most spiritually developed form of religious life, certain fruitful correlations can be established between his work on the ethical dimensions of religious community and Levinas's ethical interpretation of Judaism. These correlations suggest that both Hegel and Levinas offer articulations of what can be seen as a “biblical” mode of thought in which the dialectical relation of God and human beings is central.     

A Difference in Kind? Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on Post-secularism

Abstract

In this essay I examine the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the post-secular state. I argue that, although their views on the relation of religion and politics converge in certain respects, a profound difference remains between their overall approaches. Their disagreement on the epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons, and on the role religious arguments can play in the public sphere testify to a deeper schism. Thus what might at first seem like a quarrel about details proves to be a fundamental philosophical divide on the issue of modernity. I conclude that Taylor’s model of post-secularism is more promising as an approach to the challenge posed by growing religious and cultural diversity, for, if understood as a version of “reiterative universalism,” it avoids both moral relativism and Eurocentrism.     

“… but in its proper place. …”Religion,Enlightenment, and Australia's Secular Heritage: The Case of Robert Lowe in Colonial NSW 1842–1850

Over the last few decades historians have been rediscovering Australia's religious heritage, often in response to entrenched narratives depicting Australia's social, intellectual, and political history as a triumph of secular enlightenment over vestiges of Old World partnerships of religion, state, and society. That Australia has a rich secular heritage is indisputable, but to draw a sharp distinction between the “secular” and the “religious” is anachronistic and misguided, and any attempt to tell the story of Australia's secular heritage must acknowledge that the “secular” often found its justification flowing from more general religious premises grounded in enlightenment ideals such as rational religion, rational piety, and general Christianity. Indeed, when liberal democracy was emerging in the colonies the “secular” had to be justified in terms acceptable to the public square and these terms were broadly religious. Robert Lowe is an apt case study for divining the nature of the secular in colonial Australia, for his thought and political activity show the subtle and complex way that ideals such as “enlightenment,” “religion,” and “secular” entered into dialogue rather than warfare with one another and contributed to social institutions judged suitable for a fledgling pluralist nation.