A Thinking Reed

Category: Liberalism

  • Iowa

    My two cents, for what it’s worth: I was happy to see more or less “anti-establishment” candidates win, continuing to undermine the “inevitability” theme that had been running through the campaign. Neither Huckabee nor Obama are my ideal candidate by any stretch, but I’d much rather see a match up between those two than, say, a Giuliani-Clinton race.

    Huckabee continues to present an interesting challenge to conservative orthodoxy with his populist themes. I still don’t see these as translating into any very coherent policy positions, and I’m not sure I’d particularly like them if they did. But there’s something refreshing about his candidacy compared to the others. I still have a sneaking suspicion that the Republicans will work their way back to McCain before it’s all said and done, but then again, I also predicted that Al Gore would be the Democratic nominee.

    I have so far been less impressed by Obama than some of my friends; his vaunted oratory which seemed to promise to magically transport us to a post-partisan, post-race, post-conflict happy land always struck me as so much hot air. I don’t need or want messianism from politicians. I’m also unsure about where exactly he stands on crucial issues, foreign policy in particular. That said, I’ve always found him preferable to Hillary Clinton, so I can’t be too unhappy about his win.

  • Where’s the anti-war mojo on the Left?

    With all the hype around the Ron Paul candidacy (admittedly still a long shot), I’ve wondered why there hasn’t been a comparable anti-war insurgency on the Left. Why, for instance, hasn’t Dennis Kucinich‘s campaign taken off? Is it that Democratic voters aren’t motivated primarily by the war, or is it that they regard the top tier candidates as “anti-war enough”?

    None of the “big three” are calling for anything like immediate withdrawal from Iraq, nor have they repudiated the Bush Doctrine in principle, however much they may have criticized the conduct of the Bush administration. Clinton and Edwards have both made hawkish statements about Iran, and Obama got flak for suggesting we might need to invade Pakistan. All in all, I don’t think you can say that the Dems are set to field anything like a “peace candidate” in the fall. So why has the base been so quiet about this? It’s doubly odd considering that you had a significant anti-war challenge in 2004 (namely, Howard Dean) at a time when the war was considerably more popular than it is now.

  • Will a Democratic president remember the lessons of the last seven years?

    Jack Balkin is worried that, when it comes to executive power, ostensible Democratic critics may learn to love the imperial presidency if a Dem takes the White House in 2008.

    It’s worth recalling that conservatives used to complain about the imperial presidency, especially during a time of strong popular liberal presidents. And, more recently, Republicans were the dovish party, many of them opposing Bill Clinton’s various interventions. But we can see how that’s all changed.

    The cynical interpretation is that both parties will embrace whatever seems to be in their immediate interest without much regard for structural or procedural soundness.

  • Illiberal atheists?

    Damon Linker – who attacked the Religious Right in his book Theocons – accuses the “new atheists” of promoting an illiberal version of atheism that seeks to stamp out religious belief, rather than a more generous-minded skepticism that Linker thinks goes better with liberal politics.

    To the extent that atheism advocates using state power and other quasi-official channels of influence to eradicate religious belief it is being illiberal and would likely invite a similarly illiberal religious backlash. Fortunately, the prospects of, say, public schools announcing the “death” of God, as Linker claims Sam Harris wants, are nil. But to the extent that atheists simply want to convince people of the folly of their ways through appeals to reasoned argument they aren’t doing anything illiberal per se. Linker seems to think that being liberal means keeping ones deepest convictions as mere opinions in some ethereal private sphere. But this is a bad caricature of liberalism: a more robust version invites competing doctrines to duke it out in the public sphere, while creating a space where fragile individuals are protected from the excessive certainties of others.

  • Kucinich/Paul in ’08!

    In the – ahem – unlikely event that he secures his party’s nomination, Dennis Kucinich has suggested that – wait for it – Ron Paul might make a good running mate.

    “I’m thinking about Ron Paul” as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country,” Kucinich said.

    The Paul campaign has demurred, however.

    Unlikely as it sounds, I’ve long thought that a left-right fusion movement based around opposition to global interventionism, a defense of civil liberties, and a genuine populist critique of government and corporate elites could provide a healthy counterpoint to our current bipartisan consensus. And who better to lead it than these two gadflies?

  • Who owns Goldwater?

    With all the buzz about the conservative movement being on the verge of breaking apart, it’s interesting to contrast the present with the career of Barry Goldwater, who managed to unite libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign policy hawks. Recently even liberals have been looking back fondly (if with rose-colored glasses) on the tolerant libertarain Goldwater who didn’t think much of Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right.

    In the latest American Conservative Daniel McCarthy considers the latest wave of Goldwater revisionism and tries to uncover the essence of Goldwaterism.

  • Out in Africa

    Philip Jenkins, who arguably knows as much about Christianity in the global south as any “Northerner,” has an article on the African churches’ controversies over homosexuality at the New Republic (may require subscription to read).

    Jenkins argues that it’s misleading to see the intensity of the conflict over this as merely an extension of debates that have taken place in the West. Traditional denominations in Africa living in a context of competition with upstart Pentecostalism and with Islam have a strong incentive to toe a morally conservative line. Jenkins recounts a story from the late 19th century where Christian courtiers rejected the pederastic advances of the king of Buganda, who had come under the influence of Arab slave-trades, and were martyred for it:

    That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country’s Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive.

    The conservative stance can also be a way of burnishing African Christians’ anti-Western and anti-colonialist credentials, “making clear to their own members and their Muslim neighbors that they are not puppets of the West. Moral conservatism thus serves to assert cultural independence–a link that requires sexual immorality to be portrayed as a Euro-American import.”

    Of course, that doesn’t make it the right position, and Jenkins is quick to point out that there are more liberal elements on the continent, particularly in South Africa, where the ANC is not likely to be seen as toadying to the West. There is a plurality of voices there, not to mention in the rest of the Global South, and it is by no means confined to places like South Africa (“arguably one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.”):

    But South Africa is not the only place where gay-rights movements have gained a foothold. An Anglican group called Changing Attitude claims supporters in both Nigeria and Uganda, and the director of its Nigerian chapter, Davis Mac-Iyalla, has earned some notoriety as a liberal foil to Akinola. Some years ago, when Namibia’s then- president declared homosexuality a “behavioral disorder which is alien to African culture,” activists responded by creating a fairly overt gay-rights movement, the Rainbow Project.

    Jenkins’ conclusion is that Westerners should resist the temptation of seeing the African churches’ positions through the lens of our own controversies. Just as liberals have sometimes been prone to romanticize the “Third World,” conservatives have of late tended to see Africa as a bastion of “traditional values” holding out against the decadent West. But Jenkins advises caution: “gays in Africa face very real barriers to acceptance. And we do them no favors by viewing Africa’s culture war over homosexuality as a mere extension of the battle we are witnessing here in the United States, rather than as a fight which raises questions unique to African history and politics.”

    One might criticize Jenkins here for lapsing into a kind of moral relativism. He does tend to talk as though the churches in many parts Africa simply have no choice but to go along with the anti-gay line. This would presumably be of small comfort to gay people on the receiving end of some of the more punitive policies supported by some African churchmen. Still, I think it’s helpful to see both the plurality and the particularity of the situation, rather than as another manifestation of some kind of global “culture war.”

    UPDATE: Here’s a transcript (via The Topmost Apple) of a presentation by Jenkins on this topic with questions from a bunch of journalistic big-shots (Ken Woodward, E.J. Dionne, Jon Wilson of Books & Culture, etc.); a lot of fascinating discussion ensues.

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • A 21st century latitudinarianism

    I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…

    Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.

    Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.

    The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.

    Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.

    Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.

    Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.

    Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.

    The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).

    If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.

    On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.

    Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.

    Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).

    If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.

    What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.

    In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.