Religion in the Public Square

Rating:
Summary: AOID THIS BOOK IF YOU CAN!
Review: I was forced to read this for a college course. It is harder to read than it needs to be, and the book could actually be half as long as it is. There have GOT to be better books than this one on the same subject.

Rating:
Summary: Religious convictions as a basis for political action
Review: This book is appropriate for an upper level philosophy seminar in the major, and will also be of interest to graduate students in political science and law. The debate between Audi and Wolterstorff is not really about the entire multifaceted topic of the "separation of church and state" in the United States (a lot of which concerns the scope of freedom of religious practice and strict limitations on public funding of religious causes). The debate is actually about a much more focused topic central to democratic theory: in a nation governed by a legitimate democratic process of law and policy formation through open debate and voting, what sort of considerations is it morally legitimate for citizens invoke in deciding what laws and policies to support, and appealing to others to share their views? (Thus the question is about moral norms of citizenship, not legal norms governing actual democratic processes). In Rawlsian lingo, this is a question about the content of "public reason." Audi believes citizens in a democracy ought not invoke religious beliefs, whereas Wolterstorff thinks such beliefs are on the same epistemic footing as all other considerations on which citizens must draw in making rational judgments about the common good of their society. Other authors who have contributed to this debate include Michael Perry, John Rawls, Phillip Quinn, and the authors featured in Paul Weithman's collection. The biggest drawback of all this literature, including this book, is that the interlocutors on both sides are unfamiliar with the growing body of work on the deliberative theory of democracy coming out of the republican tradition in jurisprudence and out of discourse ethics in continental philosophy. So they to not address the implications of deliberative models of democracy for the issue of appeal to religious convictions in political action.