Browsing Faculty Publications by Title
Now showing items 44-63 of 72
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Religion in Public: Passages From Hegel's Philosophy of RightThis article argues that religion is a public matter. The discussion proceeds in two stages. First I give a normative account of religion, the state, and their dialectical relationship. After proposing a new account of "religious truth," I suggest that religion has both critical and utopian roles toward the state. Then the essay examines the political and economic roles of religion in civil society, where religion both incubates civil-societal organizations and disturbs civil-societal patterns. I conclude that religious truth, properly understood, is not incompatible with democratic communication. Contra Richard Rorty, religion is not a "conversation-stopper."
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Stout's Democracy without Secularism: But is it a Tradition?This article critiques Jeffrey Stout's suggestion in Democracy and Tradition that the practice of critical democratic questioning itself forms part of a historically unique secular tradition. While the practice of democratic questioning makes a valuable contribution to the project of fostering an "enlarged mentality" among the adherents of any particular tradition, Stout's contention that this practice itself points to the existence of a substantive tradition, one that stands apart from and is not reliant upon the moral sources of the traditions it engages, remains problematic.
