This review essay offers an overview of Darcia Narvaez’s work in moral psychology based on a representative selection of essays published over roughly the last decade. I trace the roots of her work in post-Kohlbergian moral psychology and show how her work has developed over time into one of the few attempts to articulate a normative and comprehensive moral psychology that is conversant with both moral philosophy and the neurosciences.

Murray Jardine’s The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society further develops several of the author’s political and economic concerns articulated in his earlier Speech and Political Practice. It probes the impact and implications of both Christianity and modern technology for our understanding of, and ability to cope with, problems that have become endemic to Western and, specifically, American culture. Jardine’s major continuing themes include: the importance to a well-formed self and society to be concretely grounded in a sense of place; the participation of the knower in the dynamic processes of creativity and discovery; how even a highly literate culture is nourished and equipped for its communal endeavors by the temporal and tensional vestiges of its oral beginnings; and how the crucial element of faith, understood as trust and commitment, gives to speech acts the power to shape self, society, and history. The major new focus of this book is suggested in the subtitle: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself. More thoroughly than in Speech and Political Practice, Jardine elaborates how Christianity is important in shaping our understanding of the speech act as a creative force. He outlines how Christianity and the Greek tradition have been significant forces shaping modernity; he argues that Christianity offers potential for addressing the nihilism found in the consumer society of post-modernity. Jardine is critical of those who are unable to recognize the perversions of Jesus’ message in Western history, but he is also critical of those who attribute virtually all positive developments during the past two millennia to Christianity. Nevertheless, he emphasizes the positive difference that Christian values and doctrine have made in the course of the past two thousand years. As in his earlier work, Jardine draws from an impressive range of sources, in order to make an original contribution. He is especially indebted to William Poteat, Michael Polanyi, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; his teacher Poteat’s influence is pervasive.

The author responds to reviews of two of his works, eventually extending the analysis of both books to argue that Michael Polanyi and William H. Poteat have, in their epistemological and phenomenological theories, articulated what amounts to a conception of the Holy Spirit in non-theological terminology, but that this conception needs to be more explicitly theologically informed to be refined.

This discussion, featuring short comments by R. Melvin Keiser, Durwood Foster, Richard Gelwick and Donald Musser, grew out of articles in TAD 35:3 (2008-2009) on connections and disconnections between the thought of Polanyi and Tillich (featuring essays by Foster and Gelwick with a response from Musser). Keiser raises questions about perspectives articulated in the earlier articles and Foster, Gelwick and Musser respond here.

This review essay discusses Murray Jardine’s argument in Speech and Political Practice, Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility, showing how the author skillfully draws on the thought of Michael Polanyi, William Poteat and Alaisdair MacIntyre. Jardine offers a sharp critique of contemporary culture and politics as well as political theory. He develops the idea of place, drawing attention to the acritical reliance upon context in human speech acts; this motif he argues can be a component of the new political vocabulary necessary to initiate public conversations about the common good. There are interesting questions about how Jardine’s account “fits” with some of the themes in Michael Polanyi’s political philosophy.

Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty are often viewed as arguing for philosophical positions that are generally non-Cartesian. Despite their broadly compatible orientations, their overall projects differ at key junctures. What I have called Polanyi’s “enactive realism” is an attempt to clarify what is unique about Polanyi’s epistemology. It is specifically Polanyi’s delineation of the hierarchical, stratified nature of comprehensive entities as brought forth by the structure of tacit knowing (not the hierarchy itself) that marks a key departure from Merleau-Ponty.