To Lose God is to Lose Man: What “Public Reason” Can Learn from Public Faith

Abstract

Much of liberal theory tacitly presupposes a secularized and radicalized form of the religious view called fideism, according to which reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, have nothing to say to each other. John Paul II defended the contrasting view that only rightly ordered faith allows reason to become fully itself. If he was right, however, then to purge civic discourse of expressions of faith would make it not more rational, but less. Carson Holloway convincingly demonstrates this point through a sustained examination of thinkers who shaped the present age.