More Religion in Politics

From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  This will be of interest to many MOJ readers.

Religion and the Liberal Polity

Terence Cuneo, ed., Religion and the Liberal Polity, University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, 280pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0268022895.

Reviewed by John J. Davenport, Fordham University

Religion and the Liberal Polity is a collection of innovative essays from a highly distinguished group of authors resulting from a PEW Trust seminar with Nicholas Wolterstorff. The book is similar in quality to an earlier collection edited by Paul Weithman in 1997. Most of the essays are successful in finding new angles on their chosen topics, including the question of whether it is right for citizens and officials in democratic societies to use religious beliefs as bases for political choices or cite religious reasons in political advocacy. This question has become familiar in political philosophy and democratic theory since the 1990s, when an imposing list of religious thinkers -- from Weithman and Wolterstorff to Philip Quinn, Chris Eberle, Kent Greenawalt and several others -- challenged secular-reason requirements defended by John Rawls and Robert Audi. These critics were motivated both by (1) the conviction that secularist political theory is cutting itself off from powerful strands of liberal religious conscience that helped abolish slavery and win civil rights, and (2) that contemporary liberal theory is undermining democracy by restricting it to inadequate epistemic sources of justification.

[To read the whole review, click here.]
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