The Naked Public Square Reconsidered

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Richard John Neuhaus's landmark book The Naked Public Square, ten of today's leading scholars-including Mary Ann Glendon, William Galston, Gerard Bradley, and Hadley Arkes-weigh in on the always impassioned church-state debate.

Underlying the many crises in American life, writes Richard John Neuhaus, is a crisis of faith. It is not enough that more people should believe or that those who believe should believe more strongly. Rather, the faith of persons and communities must be more compellingly related to the public arena. "The naked public square"--which results from the exclusion of popular values from the public forum--will almost certainly result in the death of democracy. The great challenge, says Neuhaus, is the reconstruction of a public philosophy that can undergird American life and America's ambiguous place in the world. To be truly democratic and to endure, such a public philosophy must be grounded in values that are based on Judeo-Christian religion. The remedy begins with recognizing that democratic theory and practice, which have in the past often been indifferent or hostile to religion, must now be legitimated in terms compatible with biblical faith. Neuhaus explores the strengths and weaknesses of various sectors of American religion in pursuing this task of critical legitimation. Arguing that America is now engaged in an historic moment of testing, he draws upon Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish thinkers who have in other moments of testing seen that the stakes are very high--for America, for the promise of democratic freedom elsewhere, and possibly for God's purpose in the world. An honest analysis of the situation, says Neuhaus, shatters false polarizations between left and right, liberal and conservative. In a democratic culture, the believer's respect for nonbelievers is not a compromise but a requirement of the believer's faith. Similarly, the democratic rights of those outside the communities of religious faith can be assured only by the inclusion of religiously-grounded values in the common life. The Naked Public Square does not offer yet another partisan program for political of social change. Rather, it offers a deeply disturbing, but finally hopeful, examination of Abraham Lincoln's century-old question--whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

This book offers a new perspective on religious freedom. Its central theme is to elucidate the meaning of religion and freedom in discussions related to religious freedom and the place of religion in the public square. One often hears that either religion must be tamed by restricting its access to public power, or that in the name of neutrality and equality no religious reasoning may be used in the political sphere, as it may be coercive to other worldviews. There is also the idea that “religion” is a feature of human life essentially distinct from “secular” features such as politics and economics, and which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote violence. Thus, the meaning of religious freedom in the twenty-first century seems uncertain. For that reason, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of religious freedom, especially in relation to the public sphere, in order to offer an answer that will guide us in discerning issues of religious freedom.

Democracy Reconsidered provides an enlightening study of democracy in America's post-modern context. Elizabeth Kaufer Busch and Peter Augustine Lawler explore some of the foundational principles of democracy as they have been borne out in American society. The essays included in this volume examine the lessons that novelists, philosophers, and political theorists have for democratic societies as they progress towards postmodern skepticism or even disbelief in the absolute principles that form the foundation of democracies. Led by the provocative observations of Lawler, a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, the first section lays out the predicament caused by the gravitation of democracy towards a disbelief in absolute truth, leading to a 'crisis of self-evidence.' The second section searches for tools that one might use to restore health to the individual and community within American democracy, including spiritual faith, creative autonomy, and philosophic inquiry. The third section addresses the supposed 'crisis in liberal education' caused by our 'crisis of self-evidence.' Included essays explore the extent to which the professed aims of liberal education may be at odds with the cultivation of dutiful citizens. The book closes by considering some of the political consequences of employing content-less freedom as the primary standard by which human behaviour is judged.

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence--a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to foreclose.

This work by Stephen Chapman offers a robustly theological and explicitly Christian reading of 1 Samuel. Chapman’s commentary reveals the theological drama at the heart of that biblical book as it probes the tension between civil religion and vital religious faith through the characters of Saul and David.

The term "culture wars" refers to the political and sociological polarisation that has characterised American society the past several decades. This new edition provides an enlightening and comprehensive A-to-Z ready reference, now with supporting primary documents, on major topics of contemporary importance for students, teachers, and the general reader. It aims to promote understanding and clarification on pertinent topics that too often are not adequately explained or discussed in a balanced context. With approximately 640 entries plus more than 120 primary documents supporting both sides of key issues, this is a unique and defining work, indispensable to informed discussions of the most timely and critical issues facing America today.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Migration presents the story of religion and migration predominantly through the experiences of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists, considering intersectional issues including race, ethnicity, class, gender and generation throughout. Many chapters are grounded in embodied ethnography including participant observation fieldwork, interviews, oral history collections and qualitative analysis, drawing on sociological and anthropological theory, as well as non-western and historical approaches to religion. Chapters also chronicle migration in regional, transnational, multicultural and populist contexts, examining everyday religiosity and religion across generations. The volume includes chapters on Islam and Muslim identity, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhism, Filipino and Korean religiosity and Polish Catholicism.