The following essay examines the temptations of ultimacy in 20th-century politics, namely, the urge to infuse temporal arrangements with transcendentalmeaning and purpose. This sets up an idolatry of the state or of political processes and brings to a halt the complex dialectic between immanence and transcendence, between what Bonhoeffer calls the “penultimate” and the “ultimate.” This dialogic encounter between claims, loyalties, purposes, and meaningsdefines the West at her best. When the window to transcendence is slammed shut and politics is subsequently sacralized, the result is a politics that crusheshuman freedom in the name of a divinized ideological purpose. In addition to Bonhoeffer, the essay brings the work of Albert Camus to bear in analyzing thismatter and offering up a politics that is neither “too low” (simply a remedy for sin) nor that aims too high and thereby, paradoxically, descends into those hellson earth that were 20th-century totalitarian societies.

Rawls and others have held that political agents in a liberal democracy should argue for their positions without adverting to religious grounds. I suggest here that this is because moral claims in general should not be grounded in religious views. Morality, I argue, consists in norms and ideals that can be defendedfrom many different comprehensive views of the good life, not from any single one (whether that single view be religious or not). It follows that politics, even insofaras it is a sub-domain of morality, need not and should not depend on religion.

I have argued elsewhere that the overall method that is required in liberal political philosophy is that of reflective equilibrium and that this method can be best understood in processual terms. In the present article I try to show how neoclassical (and other) theists can bring their convictions to bear in a politically liberal society, within the confines of this method, in a rational (rather than irrational or mad) manner.

Persisting discussion, in both the academy and the wider public, about how democracy properly relates to religion is confused. All agree that religious freedom is required, but each of its two principal interpretations, separationist and religionist, commends itself by disclosing the other’s problems. Debate between the two is a standoff because both commonly assume that religions, in the sense protected by religious freedom, are or must be treated politically as immune to argumentative assessment. A third alternative is here proposed: religious freedom presupposes that religions or comprehensive assessments answer a rationalquestion, and democracy is constituted as a full and free political discourse among them in order that governing decisions might be consistent with a validunderstanding of the common good.

This essay unfolds within the wider theological project of an apophatic relationalism. The moral intention of political theology, in its progressive hope, takes refuge here in the apophatic folds of a Cusan cosmological mysticism that, in turn, lends depth to a polyvocal Whiteheadian theology. In this paper hope finds itself tangled in the question of religio-political peace, vis-à-vis a specific thousand-year loop of Western history. In the knotty present, this cosmopolitics—with an eye to each new wave of Islamophobia—lives with uncertainty as to the realism of its pluralistically complicated peace-talk. Partners in the pilgrimage of this paper include (with Whitehead) certain political theorists who read him, especially William Connolly and Paulina Ochoa, along with William Cavanaugh, Enrique Dussel, and Eduourd Glissant, who do not. The aim will be to convert—at the level of symbolic resonance at least—what I call the crusader peace complex into the complex conviviality of peace. The pulses of this transdisciplinary exercise (an effort in self-education rather than specialization) will proceed through eight theopolitical vignettes.

How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience”? I mean by this extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation of commitments or identity. I speculate broadly about such experience, expanding the focus beyond theistic experiences, such as being “born-again.” When one does this, depth experience need not be thought, as it often is, anathema to political theory. I show rather that it can be cultivated so as to animate an admirable “bearing” on the part of citizens of affluent, late-modernsocieties.