Some (more) thoughts about Church and State

This is just a follow-up to Fr. Araujo's very helpful post the other day on John Courtney Murray and church-state relations.  As Matthew Cantirino noted, over at First Things, the upshot of Fr. Araujo's post is that "separation is not indifference."  Fr. Araujo noted, among other things:

. . . The fact that the Church and State are different and distinct does not necessarily imply that they cannot have a relationship. Moreover, separation is not synonymous with indifference. Why? Both the Church and the State have a critical interest in the common good and its furtherance. . . .

This is a point that I also tried to develop, in this short tribute-essay for my colleague, Prof. Robert Rodes (an amazing scholar who was, in fact, cited in John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths).  The paper is called "Pluralism, Dialogue, and Freedom," and it focuses in part on Rodes's use of the term "nexus", rather than "wall of separation", when talking about church-state relations:

A “nexus,” according to my dictionary, is a “means of connection; a link or tie.”  It suggests a relation, even a symbiosis, between two distinct things—neither a collapse of one into the other nor a rigid segregation of the one from the other. The term captures well, then, Rodes’s thinking about church, state, and society. As his friend Professor Thomas Shaffer put it, “the foundation of [Rodes’s] church-state theory is that the two are so intertwined—so much the remnant of Christendom—that they could not part even if they wanted to.”  This is, Shaffer notes, a “strikingly unique position” in the church-state field.