Introduction
In the history of the West, religious humanism has made only infrequent appearances and has rarely occupied center stage. It is a mode of thought that tends to arise when religious and cultural cohesion is threatened by large social and intellectual upheavals. Religious humanists are, by and large, men and women of letters (whether ordained or not) who command no legions, and who go about their work without much taste for manifestoes and movements. Indeed, they often come under attack from all sides of the ideological spectrum. But it is arguable that they are like the legendary seven good men, without whom the world would come to an end.
Take, for example, the life and career of one of history's great religious humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The recovery of the literature and culture of classical antiquity that took place in the Renaissance had no more brilliant exponent than Erasmus. The witty, erudite author of The Praise of Folly was a master of an elegant Latin prose style. Unlike many humanists of his time, he was not satisfied with merely aesthetic pleasures. At some point early in his literary career he experienced a quiet but intense conversion to the Christian faith. From that moment on he worked tirelessly to bring about reform in the Church.
Erasmus took the humanist passion for going "back to the sources" and directed it toward the Bible. His dissatisfaction with the many errors and conundrums in the Latin Vulgate impelled him to translate the New Testament from the original Greek. His goal was recover what he believed to be the clarity and simplicity of the gospel message. A harsh critic of the abuses of the medieval Church, Erasmus never tired of mocking empty rituals, superstitious practices, and the irrelevance of scholastic thinkers arguing interminably about angels, pinheads, and other abstractions. When Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, both sides of the conflict tried to recruit Erasmus as their champion. Caught between his sympathy for Protestant criticisms and a firm loyalty to a Catholic church that he thought was still reformable, Erasmus held out for many years before finally writing against Luther. By that time the course of events had overtaken him. He died, embittered by the controversies of his later years and still appalled that events had taken the tragic turn they had.
That the tragedy proceeded to its inevitable conclusion hardly invalidates the seminal contribution Erasmus made to his own time and to subsequent generations. As the author of an enduring classic of comic irony (The Praise of Folly), the father of modern biblical criticism, and the first thinker who successfully synthesized the newly emergent classicism with the Christian faith, Erasmus remains a beacon of wisdom-a peacemaker who steadfastly refused to be coopted by the ideological extremes of his own day.
Our own tumultuous time is not unlike that of Erasmus. Deep fault lines in American culture have cracked through the surface of public life as the twentieth century draws to a close. Racked by incessant "culture wars," our social order has fallen prey to various forms of tribalism. Religious, ethnic, racial and gender-based groups have withdrawn into political enclaves from when they raise the shrillness of their rhetoric to an ever-higher pitch.
The sociologist James Davison Hunter argued in his book Culture Wars (1991) that this struggle is essentially between traditionalists and progressives. In the few short years since Hunter's book was published, there is evidence the divisions in our society have become even deeper. The Right has recently been experiencing the sort of internecine struggles that have long plagued the Left. The fragile coalition of libertarians, populists, and neoconservatives that came together in 1980 to elect Ronald Reagan is unraveling. Political categories, it seems, are becoming ever more confused. This much can be said with confidence: nearly every sector of our common life has become a minefield strewn with explosive political conflicts, from our schools and churches to popular culture and the media through which this culture is transmitted.
As Hunter has pointed out, issues that are at root philosophical and theological have become thoroughly politicized. Genuine debate and reflection on the issues have been replaced by the clash of factions fighting for absolutist, ideologically pure visions. Thus the culture wars are fought out in the political realm. In a recent interview, Hunter concluded that "The only thing left to order public life is power. This is why we invest so much into politics."
In this spectacle of ideological warfare we are witnessing the final collapse of an experiment that was begun not long after Erasmus died. The rise of modern philosophy, as exemplified by thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, was a reaction to the terrible bloodshed and chaos that the religious wars of the sixteenth century left in their wake. Since the competing truth claims of the religious sects had led to internecine conflicts, philosophers like Descartes proposed to ground knowledge on human reason unaided by biblical revelation. The rise of modern science and technological progress helped to sustain the belief that secular humanism would bring about peace and prosperity.
Standing as we do on the far side of this four-hundred-year-old experiment, it is hard not to admire the scope of its accomplishments, especially the dramatic progress of modern science and technology. But as the late novelist Walker Percy frequently pointed out, the triumph of rationalistic science has not been paralleled by greater social and psychic harmony; rather, it has been marked by an increasing sense of alienation and malaise. Every grand attempt to ground human nature in some rational, secular truth-from Marx's class conflict to Darwin's natural selection to Freud's subconscious-has failed to sustain itself in either the theoretical or practical realms. As Robert Royal writes in his essay in this anthology: "Our moment is one in which the central doubters have been subjected to doubt, and no definite replacements have emerged." These efforts to construct new "master narratives" to replace the old Judeo-Christian story no longer give meaning to our lives.
To put our situation in some perspective, consider that in 1968 TIME magazine published a cover story which asked: "Is God Dead?" That story generated a considerable amount of discussion, and was considered by many to be something of a cultural watershed. By way of contrast, in the last five years TIME and Newsweek have devoted several cover stories to such topics as the existence of angels and the resurgent interest in religion and spirituality. It would appear that a large segment of our society is aware-at one level of consciousness or another-of the malaise that Percy named. Many Americans are desperately searching for something beyond the Enlightenment dream of the rational, autonomous individual who is free to acquire property and go off in pursuit of happiness.
In short, there are numerous signs, both at the polls and in the culture at large, that the Enlightenment program-which served the foundation of modern liberalism-has driven into a dead end. There is a widespread feeling that liberalism has liberated too much, that the centrifugal force of liberalism and an undiluted faith in rationalism have left the nation without a moral rudder.
But if liberalism is exhausted, conservatism-at least in its dominant forms-is hardly a vibrant intellectual force. Beyond the small enclave of neoconservatives, the two major branches of conservatism today are libertarianism and populism. Neither of these groups has much to say to the current crisis of social fragmentation. Libertarians are merely liberals who believe in the unfettered free market: both schools of thought conceive of the person as an autonomous individual whose only moral obligation is to refrain from directly injuring others. Ironically, both schools also espouse a form of economic determinism: libertarians believe that social problems with be solved by the spontaneous actions of the market, while liberals are convinced that capitalism always goes wrong and must be ameliorated by the paternalistic state.
To be sure, libertarianism has a certain appeal for those who feel oppressed by the bloated and immobile government. The libertarian vision of privatizing everything touches a deep chord in the American character: it celebrates the anarchic energy of the marketplace in which individuals are free to pursue private visions of happiness.
Populist conservatism, though it may often defend venerable institutions and moral traditions, has forfeited much of its relevance and persuasive power. Traumatized by the string of victories that secular liberals have won in the legislatures and especially the courts, populists haven fallen back on the rhetoric of righteousness and outrage. This brand of populism is not so much conservative as it is reactionary. A conservative is committed (in theory, at least) to preserving a living tradition through the inevitable changes that history brings. A reactionary, on the other hand, has a more brittle and static concept of social order. Reactionaries spend most of their time fighting rear-guard actions, using the boycott and the filibuster to plug the holes in the dike. Even a political figure with the savvy and apparent goodwill of the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed has found it difficult to communicate a positive vision of the society he wishes to promote. That he is now struggling to do so is a sign of recognition that negative movements soon run out of steam.
Within the last decade a host of proposed solutions for our deep cultural divisions have been put forward, from "communitarianism" to the "politics of meaning" to the search for a "new civility." Some of these movements have involved little more than a repackaging of old political agendas. But many others have made significant contributions. The communitarian thinkers, for example, have reminded us of the need to preserve the mediating institutions that help individuals develop personal identity, responsibility, and a sense of civic participation.
As valuable as these movements are, it is necessary to sink deeper wells if we are to strive for authentic cultural renewal. Those wells can be found, I believe, in the tradition of religious humanism.
What do I mean by religious humanism? The theologian Max Stackhouse recently provided a simple but suggestive definition. "Humanity," Stackhouse wrote, "cannot be understood without reference to God; and neither God nor God's revelation can be understood except through the lens of thought and experience."
On the face of it, the term "religious humanism" seems to suggest a tension between two opposed terms-between heaven and earth. But it is a creative, rather than a deconstructive, tension. Perhaps the best analogy for understanding religious humanism comes from the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which holds that Jesus was both human and divine. This paradoxical meeting of these two natures is the pattern by which we can begin to understand the many dualities we experience in life: flesh and spirit, nature and grace, God and Caesar, faith and reason, justice and mercy.
When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative fault), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly life and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or popular guru.
The religious humanist refuses to collapse paradox in on itself. This has an important implication for how he or she approaches the world of culture. Those who make a radical opposition between faith and the world hold such a negative view of human nature that the products of culture are seen as inevitably corrupt and worthless. On the other hand, those who are eager to accommodate themselves to the dominant trends of the time baptize nearly everything, even things that may not be compatible with the dictates of the faith. But the distinctive mark of religious humanism is its willingness to adapt and transform culture, following the dictum of an early Church Father, who said that "Wherever there is truth, it is the Lord's." Because religious humanists believe that whatever is good, true, and beautiful is part of God's design, they have the confidence that their faith can assimilate the works of culture. Assimilation, rather than rejection or accommodation, constitutes the heart of the religious humanist's vision.
One might ask why the incarnational balance of the human and the divine is not so obvious as to be universally accepted. The truth is that human beings find it difficult to live with paradox. It is far easier to seek a resolution in one direction or the other; indeed, making such choices often seems to be the most principled option. Perhaps the best illustration of religious humanism I've come across can be found in the film The Mission. It tells the story of the Jesuit missionaries who attempted to penetrate the rainforests of Brazil and bring the faith to the remotest tribes. As the film opens, we see a whole series of missionaries ejected from the tribe in a literal and gruesomely ironic fashion: each of them is tied to a cross and sent over the edge of a huge waterfall. These missionaries had evidently tried to preach at the tribesmen and they had been rejected. But the Jesuit played by Jeremy Irons enters a clearing near where the tribe lives, sits down on a rock, and begins playing a flute. This simple gesture, which appealed directly to the humanity of the tribespeople, enabled them to recognize what was human in him. They arrive with their spears raised but they soon accept him and, ultimately, convert to Christianity. (Another reason to admire The Mission is that it departs from the standard Hollywood stereotype of the missionary as a smug, sexually-repressed fanatic.)
With all these references to paradox and ambiguity the objection might be made that I am speaking in quintessentially liberal terms, refusing to state my allegiance to the particularities of the faith. In fact, the majority of religious humanists through the centuries have been deeply orthodox, though that does not mean they don't struggle with doubt or possess highly skeptical minds. This is a phenomenon that liberals tend to ignore; it doesn't tally with their notion that religious dogma are somehow lifeless and repressive. But dogma are nothing more-or less-than restatements of the mysteries of faith. Theological systems can become calcified and unreal-they can, in short, give rise to "dogmatism"-but dogma exist to protect and enshrine mystery. Flannery O'Connor, one of the great religious humanists of the twentieth century, wrote of the effect her faith had on her writing: "There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery." In a similar vein one need only think of the modern Jewish thinkers (Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas among them) who have joined their passionate love of the Hasidic tradition to such modern philosophic schools as personalism and existentialism.
So we arrive at yet another paradox: that the religious humanist combines an intense (if occasionally anguished) attachment to orthodoxy with a profound spirit of openness to the world. This helps to explain why so many of the towering figures of religious humanism-from Gregory of Nyssa, Maimonides, Dante and Erasmus to Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O'Connor-have been writers possessed of powerful imaginations. The intuitive powers of the imagination can leap beyond the sometimes leaden abstractions with which reason must work. Because the imagination is always searching to move from conflict to a higher synthesis, it is the natural ally of religious humanism, which struggles to assimilate the data of the world into a deeper vision of faith.
The assimilative power of religious humanism enables it to balance the changing circumstances of history with what T.S. Eliot called the "permanent things." One of the most luminous explanations of this balance was written by John Henry Newman, a Victorian theologian who eventually became a cardinal in the Catholic church. His book on the "development of doctrine" argues that the unfolding of history enables us to see-and respond to-new facets of meaning in the ancient dogma. Newman's concept of doctrinal development has been cited by many scholars as the underlying inspiration for the Second Vatican Council, with its stress on the need for a dialogue between the church and the modern world.
Religious humanism has flourished at various times within the Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. More often than not, it emerges as a response to periods dominated by ideological strife. In the century between 350 and 450 C.E., when the Roman Empire was breathing its last, a remarkable group of Church Fathers was at work: Augustine wrote the Confessions, the first autobiography, and The City of God, which provided the blueprint for the medieval polity; Jerome was translating the Bible from Greek into Latin; and the Cappadocian Fathers were busy adapting the last major pagan system of philosophy-Neoplatonism-for Christian purposes. With the decay of the medieval order came a series of humanists who incorporated the philosophy of Aristotle into their own traditions: the Arab thinkers Averroes and Avicenna, the Jewish leader Maimonides, and the Catholic Thomas Aquinas. Two centuries later, during the tumult of the Renaissance and Reformation, Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, and Thomas More struggled to purify the Catholic Church while a number of Protestant thinkers, John Calvin in particular, sought to create their own new theological syntheses. With the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, figures as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, François Chateaubriand, and the Oxford Tractarians (including John Henry Newman) worked to reunite faith, reason, and the imagination.
Since the roots of religious humanism go so far back into the European past, a skeptic might wonder whether such a mode of thought has ever been grafted onto American culture. After all, America is still a relatively young nation and its puritan and pragmatic strains-neither particularly hospitable to humanism-are ingrained in our history. Without intending to scant the contributions of earlier religious thinkers, I believe that the leading American representatives of religious humanism have been imaginative writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne's insistence on the reality of evil, the inexorable presence of the past, and a tragic sense of life stood in stark contrast to Emerson's optimism and utopianism. Throughout his career, Hawthorne struggled to achieve a more sacramental perspective, which placed the self in relation to the transcendent, and which encompassed a vision of redemptive suffering. It is possible to draw a direct line from Hawthorne to such modern American writers as T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.
In the twentieth century, religious humanism has manifested itself in two distinct waves. The first emerged after World War I and was largely centered in Europe, though many of its leading lights emigrated to the United States. This generation of religious intellectuals were aghast at the catastrophic effects of the war and determined to waken the churches out of the bourgeois, provincial torpor into which they had fallen. Above all, they wanted to bring their faith into a dialogue with modernity. Philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Nicholas Berdyaev engaged existentialism, while Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson brought Thomas Aquinas into the context of contemporary problems. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich struggled to find in historic Protestantism the resources to address such overwhelming questions as the rise of modern totalitarian ideologies. Georges Rouault, Eric Gill, Marc Chagall, and Jacob Epstein created paintings and sculptures with biblical subjects that broke decisively with the sentimentality of nineteenth-century religious iconography. In the realm of literature, religious humanists abounded: Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, T. S. Eliot, David Jones, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, Allen Tate, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud. Many other writers experienced intense, if sometimes fleeting, periods of religious belief including W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman.
The scope of the intellectual and artistic contributions made by these figures is astonishing. No less astonishing, from the perspective of the present, is how thoroughly these religious humanists were integrated into the public life of their own time. They taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, were invited to deliver the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, wrote for The Partisan Review and even, on occasion, for the Saturday Evening Post. They were, in short, part of a species known as public intellectuals. But as a species they are now all but extinct. Writing in The Atlantic, the cultural critic Cullen Murphy recently bemoaned the loss of this class of thinkers. Murphy's essay describes the environment in which the first wave of religious humanists flourished, along with their secular counterparts. Murphy laments
the virtual disappearance of....people like Dewey and Trilling and Howe and Niebuhr who were generalists and inhabited the outside world....as much as or more than they inhabited academe. They displayed a broad knowledge of the culture as a whole... and wrote widely of what they saw in a style that Irving Howe once characterized as "free-lance dash, peacock strut, and knockout synthesis." One thinks of them almost as circuit riders, keeping disparate segments of the national culture-segments that sometimes may not have been talking-informed about one another. Whatever their conclusions, they engaged moral and religious considerations with respect, and helped preserve the public role of these things.
As late as 1950, Murphy notes, the Partisan Review was willing to devote a major symposium to the subject of "religion and the intellectuals."
With the massive social, political, and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the era of the public intellectual-and the religious humanist-seemingly came to an end. Brilliant as the first wave of twentieth-century religious humanists were, they lived in a time, like that of Erasmus, when the tectonic plates of culture were shifting under their feet, driven by pressures that had been building up for decades if not centuries. Secular liberalism made huge strides in the 1960s and 70s, transforming government, academia, and social mores, as well as having a profound impact on churches and synagogues. Young theologians like Harvey Cox got swept up in the spirit of the time. Cox's The Secular City neatly encapsulated the drift of liberal theology: having lost confidence in the traditional doctrines of sin, grace, and redemption, theologians from all sectors of the religious community hastened to celebrate the secular. A corollary of this movement was a heightened involvement in politics. While this politicization led to some constructive and necessary engagements, including the civil rights movement, many liberal theologians and clerics went on to defend causes such as financial support for Marxist guerrillas around the globe.
What these liberal theologians and crusaders failed to understand was that they were, in essence, defining themselves out of their jobs. They, too, were swept along in these social changes, only to find that the secular city had no need for them. Along with these cultural shifts, a series of Supreme Court decisions limiting the presence of religion in schools and other public institutions helped to create an atmosphere that banished faith from the public square. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s there were few magazine symposia on "religion and the intellectuals" because it was widely assumed that the two never mixed.
The battlelines of our current culture wars were first set out in the 1960s, not only as a result of external factors like Supreme Court decisions, but in the personal, psychic experiences of many young intellectuals of the time. Hardened by the fires of that ideological decade, many of these thinkers underwent political conversion experiences-most from Left to Right (including, of course, the neoconservatives), but with a few (such as Garry Wills) in the opposite direction. One cannot help but admire the steady stream of books, journals, and organizations that have been produced by these culture warriors. Nevertheless, there is something tragic about the way this politicized rhetoric has narrowed the range of our public discourse. Today, rather than the circuit-riding public intellectuals of an earlier generation, we have road shows by political performance artists. The religious community, far from being exempt from this trend, has been deeply implicated in it. Take, for example, the seemingly respectable world of thoughtful religious magazines and journals. Whereas these publications once gained their distinctiveness from their theology, the majority of them today are known-and read-primarily for which side of the political fence they come down on.
And yet, despite the harshness of our cultural climate, a new generation of religious humanists is making its presence known. Many of the most dynamic of these thinkers were born a generation after the one that experienced the divisiveness of the 1960s. While these younger thinkers care passionately about the issues at the heart of the culture wars, but they seek a less apocalyptic and political role for religion. To a great extent, they draw their inspiration from the first wave of twentieth-century religious humanists, who were "assimilators" rather than warriors. But there is a significant difference. Whereas thinkers like Eliot could still rely on a social order in which religion was entrenched, the contemporary thinkers face a cultural situation that can only be described as post-Christian. This has given rise to a whole new series of cultural and intellectual approaches.
The new religious humanists have a number of things going for them. Now that the Baby Boomers have arrived at middle age, fully aware for the first time of their mortality and concerned about their children's moral and physical well-being, we have witnessed a wave of interest in religion, ranging from interest in New Age pantheism to a nostalgia for traditional rites and moral codes. Indeed, religious humanism must compete with the Wal-Mart of spiritual and therapeutic nostrums available today. Even if much of this can be discounted as sentimental religiosity, there is a spirit of openness that can, and must, be addressed.
There is no "school" of religious humanism, no centralized office or publication that represents it to the worlds of politics or the media, no platform with readily identifiable political planks. However, there are subtle but powerful threads that link many of the most distinguished minds of our time. In philosophy Alasdair MacIntrye and Charles Taylor have brought the existence of God and the idea of "the good" back into serious discussion. Theologians such as the American Jesuit Avery Dulles, the German Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenburg, and the late Hans Urs von Balthasar and his disciples have demonstrated that faithfulness to the ancient teachings of the church can inspire nuanced and creative thought. There are also a growing number of scholars who have been meditating on the relationship between religion and science, including Stanley Jaki, John Polkinghorne, and Langdon Gilkey.
One clear lesson that these thinkers have learned from the culture wars is that the process of politicization endangers the ability of religion to permeate and renew the very culture that is being fought over. The culture wars might be likened to two gardeners who spend all their time spraying rival brands of pesticide, while forgetting to water the plants and fertilize the soil. Perhaps the most frightening thing about this syndrome is that it seems to bestoken a pervasive despair about the very possibility of cultural renewal. To cite just one example of this from my personal experience: the vast majority of conservatives I have encountered are firmly convinced that almost nothing of value has been produced in Western culture for over a hundred years. There is an element of simple Philistinism here, but there is also the despair of those who can only look backward.
Yet another paradox of religious humanism is that it combines a tragic sense of life-an awareness of our fallenness and the limits of human institutions-with a strain of persistent hope. T.S. Eliot once said that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes. The religious humanist refuses to give in to apocalyptic fears, believing that grace is always available, and that the life-giving soil of culture is often seeded wi th suffering. If, as I believe, faith and imagination are the two primary sources of culture, then even in the darkest time it is possible to make poems and prayers out of our travails.
The new religious humanists know that culture shapes and informs politics far more powerfully than the other way around. They recognize that symbolism, imagery, and language play a crucial role in forming attitudes and prejudices, and have devoted themselves to nourishing the imaginative life. At a time when the model of Enlightenment rationalism is crumbling under the weight of post-modern cynicism and nihilism, the religious imagination can speak meaningfully into the void.
In fact, it is the novelists and poets who are at the heart of the resurgence of religious humanism in our time. An entire bookshelf of anthologies could be gleaned from such writers as Elie Wiesel, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, Chaim Potok, Reynolds Price, Garrison Keillor, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Denise Levertov, Dana Gioia, Andre Dubus, Frederick Buechner, Louise Erdrich, Larry Woiwode, Tobias Wolff, Mark Helprin, Ron Hansen, Doris Betts, James Lee Burke, Michael Malone, Madeleine L'Engle, Sue Miller, Jon Hassler, J.F. Powers, Edward Hirsch, and Paul Mariani. Internationally, writers like Torgny Lindgren from Sweden, Tim Winton and Les Murray from Australia, the late Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, and Muriel Spark, Piers Paul Read, and Susan Howatch from England have created a rich and enduring body of work. In the world of classical music nearly half a dozen contemporary Christian composers have been on the best-seller lists, including Arvo Pärt from Estonia, Henryk Górecki of Poland, and John Tavener and James Macmillan from Britain. A few years ago I founded Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, a quarterly publication that gathers together the wealth of material that is emerging from this aesthetic renaissance. And yet, despite all this outpouring of creativity, many critics still make dour comments about the lack of serious religious writers and artists.
Unlike the culture warriors, with their short-term political strategies, the new generation of religious humanists are not afraid that the sky will fall any time soon; they are, in fact, willing to devote themselves to the slower rhythms of real cultural change. For example, in her essay in this anthology on "Abortion and the Search for Common Ground," Frederica Matthewes-Green reports on a remarkable dialogue that is now taking place between some members of the pro-life and pro-choice communities. Or take Wilfred McClay's essay on the role of religious faith in American higher education, which contains wisdom that, if heeded, could bring about lasting change in one of our most troubled institutions. In his essay "Second Genesis: The Biotechnology Revolution," Andrew Kimbrell demonstrates an ability to combine his environmental activism with a sacramental theory of nature and the body.
This anthology of writing by contemporary religious humanists is intended to demonstrate the vitality of their ideas, the imaginative depth and resonance of their vision, and the diversity of their interests. All of these writers are making active contributions to American culture. They include some of our most eloquent and sagacious thinkers, including Robert Coles, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard, as well as several outstanding representatives of the younger generation. Here, I would submit, are some of the true public intellectuals of our time.
Finally, I believe this collection proves that the old political categories of Left and Right are increasingly irrelevant. By returning to the traditional sources of their religious traditions, these writers have found themselves addressing the present in new ways. Having sought out the perennial truths of religious faith, they return to the present and find themselves sharing, often unexpectedly, spiritual and intellectual common ground. In a culture as fragmented and contentious as ours, this may be the most heartening news this generation of thinkers can bring us.