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Within Western liberal democracies a variety of answers are given to the question of how, within a polity wherein a plurality of different visions of the good life coexist, some form of common life is to be forged. This chapter outlines three of these answers and situates them within wider philosophical and theological debates about the role of religious reasons in public political deliberation. The first approach assessed is the translation model. The work of John Rawls is assessed as a paradigmatic example of such an approach. An alternative to the translation model is the conversation model. The emphasis in this model is on the attempt to take seriously the actual beliefs and practices of particular traditions as the basis for common deliberation. The work of Jeffrey Stout and Alasdair MacIntyre are discussed as examples of this approach. It is argued that they attempt to develop an account of how diverse and incommensurable moral traditions can deliberate about common action without having to find some agnostic or neutral language into which all ‘thick’ language must be translated. The third approach outlined is the hospitality model. While there is much overlap with the conversation model, the hospitality model represents a specifically Christian theological approach to determining common action between diverse traditions. Like the conversation model, the hospitality model seeks to give an account of how different traditions can engage directly with each other. But its emphasis is on common public action, rather than conversation or dialogue. The article ends with a comparative analysis of all three models.

This chapter opposes the secularist view that religious or theological speech should be banned from public discourse or translated into publicly accessible language. First, it presents an argument against the legalization of voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, which, it claims, is at once thoroughly theological and publicly accessible. This involves critical reflection on what it means to be ‘thoroughly theological’ and ‘publicly accessible’. Next, against this understanding of a theological argument the chapter proceeds to assess the relevant theories of Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Jeffrey Stout. This assessment analyzes the variety of things that ‘public reason’ can mean, and it explains why the requirement that theological speech be translated into secular discourse is wrong. Finally, the chapter concludes that Stout's model of candid public conversation is implicit in the unofficial late Rawls, and is more satisfactory than the model of translation espoused even by the recent, religion-friendlier Habermas.

This chapter argues that most forms of political liberalism — including those of theorists such as Jeffrey Stout who are receptive to the consideration of religious reasons and theological ethical contributions in a secular democracy — prohibit serious discussion of the religious cosmologies underlying religious ethical discourse. In particular, it is argued that secular state sovereignty rooted in Hobbesian political theory effectively eliminates all forms of messianic political theology from public consideration. The chapter goes on to argue that a messianic ethics engages secular pluralism critically in a public stance that is neither accommodationist nor separatist, but ‘diasporic’. It acts ethically from a ‘weak Messianic’ power (Benjamin) exercised not through the coercive enforcement of political ideals but in quotidian acts of community service that build up the well-being of the saeculum from below.

Chapter 8 employs insights from the work of pragmatist philosophers Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Jeffrey Stout, and speech-act theory to further clarify, enrich, and expand Frei's account of literal reading and the plain sense of scripture. It aims to identify and sort out the several delicately interwoven strands of normative constraint in scriptural practices which easily become tangled in Frei's latest writings. Such tangles obscure the nuances of his claims and invite charges that Frei, for instance, merely offers cultural-linguistic correction of his earlier claims about realistic narrative, and that what inevitably ensues is a textual "warranted assertability" that collapses meaning into the community of readers' uses of the text.

This chapter examines Jeffrey Stout’s claim that American constitutional democracy constitutes a well-functioning moral and political tradition that is not hostile to religion, although it does not depend on any specifically religious claims. It argues that the claim can be given additional support by a consideration of well-known cases in contract law. The chapter first shows how contract law can be understood as a MacIntyrean tradition. It then illustrates the mutually interpreting nature of rules and facts, by close attention to a case involving fraud, Syester v. Banta. It concludes by suggesting that both religious and secular ethicists might find common law cases in general and contract-law cases in particular to be a rich source of moral reflection.

This essay discusses the thesis of Jeffrey Stout that modern societies are ‘secular’, not in the sense that religion has disappeared from them, but in a procedural sense having to do with what can properly be assumed by participants in moral or political discussion. It endorses that thesis, but argues that Stout employs a notion of justification (with regard to moral belief) which leans too far towards descriptivism or relativism. As an alternative account of the status of religion within ‘the hypercontext, modernity’, it commends Kant’s view of the religious attitude as a fundamentally ethical one, destined eventually to dispense with any ‘historical vehicle’ in the form of revealed doctrine or supernaturalism. Stout’s discussion is weakened, the essay suggests, by its retreat from commitment to the unity of practical reason. He does, however, pay illuminating tribute to the democratic values of civility and attentiveness.

‘An Ethical Postlude’ returns to reflect directly on an understanding of tradition that frames how Boethius and Benedict relate to Augustine vis-à-vis the theme of prayer. This final chapter reflects on the kinematics of tradition, that is, on the actual motions qua motions of the act of tradition. This chapter engages the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout, both of whom have offered challenges to religious ethicists to broaden their historical horizons. Through critical engagement with MacIntyre and Stout, this chapter presents a case for an historical approach to Christian existence which can still give rise to meaningful moral and ethical reflection without having to accept (consciously or unconsciously) a Hegelian metaphysics of history.