Many of these sites have acquired a virtual as well as concrete reality thanks to the archiving and access to their imagery on the web. I think of the man alone confronting a tank in Beijing 20 years ago. And the photo essays of the streets of Tehran today. These images are many and everywhere present.

Then there are the actual sites that continue to draw millions: the Holocaust museum and in Germany itself, the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, not to mention Berlin itself, a stirring site of continual sacred recommittments to the lessons of WWII. (Germany has never had more projects under construction to memorialize this sad epoch in its history than it does in 2009).

Finally, there is the Memorial to the students slain in Mississippi at Western College, Miami University of Ohio, where they were trained and then sent forth to die for the cause in very short order. This year is a special year of commemoration, but every year their sacrifice becomes more resonant, not less. Like all forms of Truth, for the commitment to have a religious element, people must be prepared to die for it. And their deaths must be remembered on a global scale. There is a globalization force at work in the movement towards the truth of the religion of humanity, even if it does not always move with as much force and effect as we would like.

“The inner weakness of the democratic peoples,” Kaplan insisted, “have been a factor in fanning the ambition of agressors.”

In 1945 in the context of the then well-known “Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in their relation to the Democratic Way of Life,” a major gathering of political intellectuals in the United States, Kaplan also sought to devise an Aristotelian “cultural esperanto” in order to provide a philosophical anthropology for this vision, as an international vision of cultural reconstruction. This makes Kaplan’s concrete efforts all the more interesting for this reader, as his Aristotelian interests recall the more recent writings of MacIntyre, Taylor, and Robert Bellah himself.

Kaplan also took the trouble to try to move beyond what Robert Bellah alludes to as an “abstract consitutional patriotism” (Habermas) in realizing his distinctive brand of Durkheimian thinking. In The Faith of America, which he edited with J. Paul Williams and Eugene Kohn, he actually gave us a liturgy for the American civil-religious calendar, and challenged Americans to cultivate a democratic piety, an appreciation of these days and their liturgical meanings as sources of self.

Certainly, many people looking at The Faith of America today would find it unbearably quaint, dated, and provincial; and, alas, this is just the sort of difficulty that becoming concrete, in the way Kaplan did, brings to mind.

This is not, to be sure, an argument against the undertaking–Jeffrey Stout’s recent exploration of Emersonian piety comes to mind as an exceedingly modest, if interesting, beginning at cultural concreteness in its enthusiasm for Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” and Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man; but taking a proposal like Kaplan’s into consideration can be a sobering reminder of the challenge of concreteness.

Avi Bernstein
Hebrew College
Newton Centre, MA