Early actions and statements suggest that, in keeping with his namesake, the new pope will adopt a more humble, ascetic style, and work to reorient the church toward a fuller embrace of its mission to serve the poor. But critics have also pointed out that Francis remains bound to the same conservative positions on questions of sexuality, gender, and reproduction upheld by his predecessors. Moreover, questions have been raised about the new pope’s relationship to the military junta responsible for Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 80s, when Bergoglio served as provincial for the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Does the election of Francis I signal a major shift in Vatican policy, structure, or doctrine? How significant is Francis’ status as an “outsider” to the Roman Curia, especially his background as a Latin American and a Jesuit? Is this status likely to position him as an agent of change within the Church, or do his theological continuities with his predecessors and the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy guarantee that any reform he initiates will be largely cosmetic?

Our respondents are:

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociologyx, University of New Hampshire

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

J. Michelle Molina, John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

The election of Pope Francis, an Argentinian Jesuit who has many years of experience ministering to and living amidst the poor is refreshing. It sends a symbolic reminder to the world that the Catholic Church is geographically universal and that its ethnically, culturally and economically diverse members enact an on-the-ground catholicity that continues the living tradition of Catholicism. Closer to home, it is also particularly significant to the growing number of Hispanic Catholics who are putting their imprint on American Catholicism that the new pope is from their home region and speaks their language. Symbolism alone, of course, does not produce institutional change. But change, I would argue, is an ever-present fermenting possibility in the Church. I know it is easy to point to the encrusted ways in which the church operates and to the many well-established doctrinal and institutional mechanisms it uses to resist the tides of social and cultural change in the name of Tradition. Yet, as Benedict’s resignation itself underscores, where there is a will to do things differently, it can be legitimated within the confines and with the imprimatur of the Church. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) is the most obvious and the most transformative case in point; and yet it, too, was fully in continuity with already existing doctrinal strands in Catholic thought (a point recently reaffirmed by Benedict).

The many legitimation problems confronting the Church today call out for a willfully bold response from Francis. For example, the acute shortage of priests in the U.S. and its implications for the celebration of the Eucharist strike at the theological and the communal core of what it means to be Catholic. While some will resolutely resist change in the Church’s understanding of ordination for political and doctrinal reasons, the larger question demanding Francis’s leadership is whether the Catholic tradition can continue as a living tradition if its members cannot participate in its core ritual. Sometimes, particularly over the course of a long and pluralistic tradition like Catholicism, a discontinuity with settled practices (e.g., changes with respect to who may be ordained) may be necessary in order to sustain more important continuities (e.g., the Eucharist, which according to the Catholic Catechism is the vital source and summit of Catholic life).

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John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

The election of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a relative unknown and conservative initially seemed par the course, given all the conservative cardinal candidates appointed by John II and Benedict XVI. However, statements he made as a cardinal indicated a potential openness to change regarding issues like celibacy and gay marriage: “For the moment I’m in favor of maintaining celibacy, with its pros and cons, because there have been 10 centuries of good experiences rather than failures. It’s a question of discipline, not of faith. It could change.” And while he did publicly opposed the Argentinian government’s move to legalize gay marriages, he did eventually indicate support the Church’s recognition of civil unions for gay couples.

While Liberals or Progressives welcome a move away from Benedict XVI’s retrenchment and retreat from the spirit of Vatican II, Francis’ conservative theological opposition to married clergy, women’s ordination, and abortion/birth control are all significant hurdles. However, Pope Francis could lay the groundwork for future change. With regard to women in the Church, while he may not alter his opposition to women priests, a first step, based on recent scholarship that demonstrates women had prominent leadership roles in the early Church, would be to support their ordination as deacons. Given recent Vatican appointments, the Vatican decision last year to place Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the main representative group of U.S. Catholic sisters, under the control of bishops, which was made without consultation or knowledge of Congregation for Religious, the Vatican office that normally deals with matters of religious life, may well be reversed.

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Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

If you want a pope who’s going to support abortion, women’s ordination, and gay marriage, Pope Francis is going to disappoint you. (If you want him to spend a lot of time opposing them, you’ll be disappointed too.) I don’t think those issues bother him, which, well, bothers those folks—liberal and conservative, Catholic and non-Catholics—whose first priorities are pelvic. While these are not “first world” problems (gay rights, women’s rights, and sexual health matter everywhere), glance at the global church and you’ll find they can sometimes obscure others: war, environment, poverty, and corruption, to name a few. Through its tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, the Church has maintained its Gospel commitments to peace and the poor, even if these teachings’ sometimes low priority make them the Church’s “best kept secret.” Because of his experience in the Global South and because his order vows to be loyal to the Vatican’s teachings but not tempted by its trappings (their founder Ignatius was sometimes misrecognized in Rome because of his filthy robe), Pope Francis will change things. Like that earlier Francis, he will lead by example, cleaning up Vatican careerism, striving to make our world cleaner and safer for this and future generations, and modeling a concern for the poor, whether blocks away or around the world. He will make a difference on gender as well: he’s appointing women to key Vatican positions, washing women’s feet, and attempting unprecedented though not uncanonical innovations. Pope Francis’s radical commitment to Gospel values might not be the precise political goals of estadounidense liberals and conservatives, but I hope I can be forgiven for believing, with that first Francis and this one, that a recommitment to Christ’s values of poverty, peace, and compassion might be enough.

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Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

As a non-Vatican insider (thank heaven!), all speculation about the degree of Pope Francis I’s departure from the conservatism of his two immediate predecessors seems to be just that. However, an analogy with not-too-distant history of a different kind may be apt. I’m thinking of the Mikhail Gorbachev analogy—someone who was supposed to shake things up just enough, provide some new thinking, but not change the order of things. And of course Gorbachev himself intended to rejuvenate an ossified governing structure and alliance without bringing the whole edifice down. Yet Gorbachev helped set in motion a series of events that in the end went far beyond his vision or his control, opening spaces for restive social movements to grow, innovate, and initiate the end of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European alliance.

We can only hope that this Pope’s current initiatives, however modest at the moment, might open just enough space to engender a similar and perhaps even more revolutionary awakening of restive Catholics and Catholic theology in the world. It is unlikely that Francis will initiate a revolution in Catholic social teaching himself. Nevertheless, the theological and social resources are present for such a revolution, but each and every opening needs to be better articulated, acted upon, and expanded by Catholics across the globe. Such activism should not remain warehoused in either social or economic agendas, but should combine both in an across-the-board insistence on the transformational potential of Catholic teachings on “catholic” love and human dignity, if only they can genuinely include the poor and people of all genders and sexuality as equals.

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James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

Pope Francis has already initiated change in the Vatican. But when looking for “change” we should be careful to consider not only words, but also symbolic actions, which carry enormous weight in Christian and especially Catholic circles. Remember that Jesus did not only teach with words, but with his actions as well. The first Jesuit pope ever elected (itself a sign of change within the College of Cardinals) chose the name Francis, as a sign of his commitment to the poor and to what he would later call “a church that is poor.” So far he has eschewed many of the trappings of his papal office—setting aside some of the more elaborate vestments that popes have worn, choosing to move out of the grand Apostolic Palace (aptly named) into a small two-room suite, and also referring to himself not as “pope” but as the “Bishop of Rome.” On Holy Thursday, when priests traditionally wash the feet of parishioners to emulate Jesus’s washing the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper, and as a reminder that the true leader is the one who serves, Francis broke with tradition. Instead of celebrating this Mass at a grand church in Rome and washing the feet of priests, he went to a youth detention center and washed (and kissed) the feet of young inmates, including two women and a number of Muslims. Pope Francis’s unexpected liturgical action was a vivid symbol of his desire to do whatever is needed to spread the Gospel in new ways to a world hungry for authenticity. Will changes come to the Vatican? They already have.

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J. Michelle Molina, The John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

In these early days of Francis’s papacy, change seems to be in the air. Yet the ethereal currents are impossible to chart, in part given the flimsiness of available categories. “Liberal,” “conservative,” “radical,” “outsider,” “entrenched,” are tin sign-posts that, in often too breezy assessment, rattle rather uselessly.

What is possible with a Jesuit as pope? We can best grasp the inability to easily capture this man and this moment if we approach “possibility” as framed by the philosophical practice that is the Spiritual Exercises. This program of spiritual renewal offers the means through which every Jesuit finds his vocation; he also takes up these meditative practices to shape his attitudes and actions in everyday life.

The purpose of undertaking the Spiritual Exercises is to know and overcome oneself in an effort to find God—in particular, the Jesuit seeks to discern God’s will as he evaluates his life in terms of the past, present and future. The question “what ought I do for Christ now?” is how every Jesuit—Pope Francis included—tests himself.

In other words, we would be wise to be attuned to how Francis prays. For Jesuits, prayer and meditation signal that life is full of possibility. As Bergoglio wrote in a recent publication: “To pray is an act of freedom.” To pray, he continues, is to take leave of self, of the desire for control, or any effort to gain the upper hand with God. And this meditative experience must find its full expression in the world as the Jesuit looks for God in all things. Or as Bergoglio says in the same publication, “My experiences with God are found on the road, located in the search itself, in the act of giving myself over to the search.”

If we inhabit a moment of suspense in these early moments of his papacy, so does Francis. Yet he has been trained to live in that tension, to avoid easy categorization, to discern signs, to listen, to test. Francis, as a Jesuit, is necessarily experimental, paying attention to the ordinary as he discerns what might be possible within the Church he now leads.

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Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

Like many people, my first reaction to the news of Cardinal Bergoglio’s accession to the papacy was “Who is that?” By no means one of the much-discussed frontrunners singled out in the lead up to the conclave, Pope Francis is something of an unknown quantity. This has in many ways inflated the expectations of Catholics across the ideological spectrum, who see in Francis an answer to the grave challenges currently confronting the Church.

A new translation of the dialogue between then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka provides some indication of the direction the new pope may take. These pages reveal to us, as John Allen puts it, a “moderate realist” whose unimpeachable orthodoxy on the major doctrinal questions is tempered by a characteristically Jesuit sense of flexibility and practicality. Citing the late Cardinal (and fellow Jesuit) Henri de Lubac, Pope Francis calls upon the clergy to avoid the temptations of both politicization and quietist retreat into a private faith that ignores the central religious significance of social engagement.

It will be interesting to observe how Francis squares these commitments with his new role as both a temporal and spiritual sovereign. I suspect that the main features distinguishing his papacy from that of his predecessor will remain at the level of personal style and symbolics. While Francis’ impressive humility and personal piety may help to rebuild the spiritual stature of an institution that has been severely damaged by revelations of sex abuse, corruption and curial infighting, the new pope is unlikely to push through the kind of substantive doctrinal reforms for which many liberal Catholics worldwide have been clamoring. At best, we are likely to see some reforms to the bureaucratic structure of the Curia and a more collegial leadership style. The appointment of the “G8”—an advisory commission of eight cardinals representing every continent—signals the new pope’s desire to reorient the Vatican towards a more global outlook that is responsive to the concerns of the local churches. It also signals a shift in the balance of power away from the Secretariat of State, which took on an expanded role under Benedict XVI. However, the new pope is unlikely to inaugurate a “Vatican Spring” of the kind Hans Küng called for in a powerful editorial penned on the occasion of Benedict’s resignation.

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Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people come to experience nonmaterial objects such as God as present and real, and how different understandings of the mind affect mental experience. She is the author, most recently, of When God Talks Back (Knopf, 2012), which The New York Times Book Review called “the most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years,” and of other books including Of Two Minds (Knopf, 2000), The Good Parsi (Harvard, 1996), and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard, 1989). Her latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, builds on and extends her research for When God Talks Back, taking her to India and Africa. On a recent rainy afternoon in Palo Alto, I spoke with Luhrmann about her work and its new directions.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: In the final chapter of When God Talks Back, you argue that God for evangelicals is not a rejection of modernity but rather an expression of what it is to be modern. How is this the case?

Tanya Marie Luhrmann: I think that the two big characteristics of modernity are the availability of science, and pluralism. And these make the uncertainty of your own cognitive position much more available to you. So using the imagination to make God real helps to make God real. Doing this also has characteristics that we associate with postmodernity—the playfulness, the uncertainty, the sense that there is a there there but maybe we don’t really get to it directly. From what I know of early Christianity, the idea of seeing through a glass darkly was extremely salient in the first and second centuries, was less salient to a faith that was very confident, and is highly salient to modern people. It allows you to imagine God walking by your side. Are you just making that up or is it real in the world? C.S. Lewis is sure that God is real, but then, he’s also writing a novel about it. The availability of disbelief is a condition of modernity. You cannot but be aware that other people think differently—that they may disbelieve your belief. And the evangelical walking with God is a sort of suspension of disbelief, which is not really relevant unless disbelief is relevant.

SBA: And yet the evangelicals you study do not often turn away from their disbelief or doubt or skepticism; they are constantly returning to it.

TML: They don’t think of themselves as doubting God, but they are extremely articulate about how God is present through the human. They know that there are Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, and it’s very difficult for a smart, university-educated person to say, “Hindus have culture, but we don’t, we have truth.” So you are committed to having truth, but you also have culture. You also know that if God is talking to you in your mind, first of all you have God. But at the same time, you are aware that you are mistaken some of the time. Holding both of these simultaneously is the modern predicament—the awareness of the uncertainty of your knowledge.

SBA: That’s fascinating. And it runs up against the typical critique of evangelicals, especially by Dawkins and the new atheists, that evangelicals are turning away from the modern predicament, away from ambiguity and rational discernment.

TML: Yes. And the new atheists are not exceptionally articulate about the limitations of human knowledge. These guys are just seeing a different beyond, a different more, whatever it is. It took me a while to recognize how sophisticated people were about belief. My own preconception was that belief was a proposition rather than an attitude. And I remember doing research for When God Talks Back and being in this prayer group with a bunch of women, and they were all so clear about their awareness of the possibility that they were wrong—not about whether God exists, but about whether God is present right here. So in fact as you bring God closer you become more aware that He might not be present. You allow yourself to tolerate the uncertainty, because the uncertainty is very clear. You give yourself the real literal text, but you interpret it in a way that makes it flexibly fictional even though it’s nonfiction. You are saying things like, “this is a love letter written to me,” but you’re sitting in a room with ten people, all of whom cognitively see the same text, but also believe that it is God’s specific, unique love letter written to each individual self.

SBA: I’m reminded here of how for Robert Orsi belief is less important than relationships. And for you as well, equating religion with belief seems inadequate.

TML: That’s right. It’s about attitude. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is my lens here. We think of belief as propositional, and of faith as an attitude, an orientation, a way of committing to a sense that the world is good despite all evidence to the contrary. So from that perspective, I resonate with faith. Belief is tough for me. Adopting the idea that the world is good despite evidence is almost an emotional attitude, a way of being in the world. The evangelicals are certainly strong on belief—but their practice is about changing faith.

SBA: A major form of the evangelical practice is kataphatic or “imagination rich” prayer. How does this prayer work in terms of altering the mind and helping evangelicals achieve an interactional relationship with God?

TML: It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good. Kataphatic prayer helps you to do this. You are allowing yourself to live in a daydream, to walk with God, talk with God, hang out with Mary. And by treating the daydream not as ephemera but as something real in the world, it becomes a skill on which you can improve.

SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecideable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

SBA: Readers persistently try to gauge your relationship to your evangelical subjects. Joan Acocella in her The New Yorker review of When God Talks Back observed that your attitude toward your subjects is “wavering,” difficult to pin down. Is this intentional?

TML: It is intentional. And I also probably do not have control over all of it. I think that the question of whether God is real is undecidable—but I still have a decision about it. I have a view. I struggle with the idea that there is this external ontology, but I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of faith. People do say things that are sort of ridiculous, and I cannot not hear those stories. I don’t tell a lot of those stories because I want readers to pay attention to these amazing experiences. But I also think that Joan Acocella struggled with the ambiguity of the anthropologist’s role. My duty as an anthropologist is first to understand. And as a journalist you are also trying first to understand—but judgment is much more part of the story that you’re telling. The Boston Globe called this “a curiously polite book.” And I mean, I do have a lot more to say about politics, but I didn’t want the book to be about politics because in my world it is such a powerful idea that their politics are wrong and therefore that these people are foolish. Of course, now I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more on politics—but the book was so long already.

SBA: Non-evangelicals may view evangelical religion as weird, but politics often seem the bigger sticking point. Does introducing readers to evangelical religion absent politics allow outsiders to then begin approaching the politics in a way that is less divided?

TML: That is my hope. Since spending time in this world, I have come to understand how one could become so agitated about government programs.One of the things that is so striking about this world is that people imagine themselves in a relationship with God in which they are both changing.God is interacting with you, and you are becoming a better person, and your understanding of God is changing over time. There is a real aspirational quality to evangelical Republican politics. For many but not all evangelicals, this translates into the idea that government programs that encourage dependency are wrong: “We aren’t going to need entitlements. I’m not going to be an entitled person. It’s weak to want entitlements.” And now I have a much richer sense of how you could take that position. I still get driven up the wall; I find that my own political convictions are still as they were when I began. But I am less angry. When somebody says that we should cut welfare, at least I can appreciate more of where they are coming from.

SBA: Your project for the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative seems to emerge from and extend the research you did for When God Talks Back. You are looking at similar prayer practices, but comparatively across cultures that you view as having different “theories of mind”?

TML: Yes. I noticed two things from this book. First of all, the way people paid attention to their mental events changed their mental events. Giving significance fundamentally changed those experiences; the mental images felt sharper. And at the same time, there’s also something about the way people think about their minds. Americans think of thoughts as basically ephemeral, flighty, contradictory, and chaotic. And so in the American context what kataphatic prayer practice does is to teach people to take certain kinds of those thoughts very seriously. Now, when you look across the world, there are different conceptions of mind, different theories about the way that thoughts act on the world. And so I began to wonder: How would this affect the experience of God, the experience of prayer? I worked together with one of my postdocs looking at unusual spiritual experiences. One of these experiences was sleep paralysis or “night terrors,” a physiological experience where you are sort of awake but your body is sort of asleep, paralyzed. I talked to evangelicals in America, and something like 30 percent reported experiencing this, but it wasn’t a very rich category for them. Then my postdoc went to Thailand to research these experiences. Everybody in Thailand knew what sleep paralysis was, and they gave it a name. Two thirds had experienced it. And so it seemed to me that there was a story to tell. My hypothesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind and body probably shapes the experience of the mind and body.

SBA: You chose to extend your research on evangelical prayer in two places where you have also conducted research on schizophrenia—Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. What have you gathered so far about the operative theory of mind in each of these places?

TML: Very quickly and naïvely—part of the project is to become more confident about this—in West Africa, there is a sense that thought affects the world independent of the thinker. And so there seems to be this really powerful concern to scrub the mind clean. Negative thoughts are bad, and consequential. People are clear that prayer is about organizing the mind into the right position, about having the right thoughts and getting rid of negative thoughts. If you talk to Americans about talking to God, they’re hanging out with God, jumping with God, cuddling with God. And they have this idea that the mind is private, walled-off. Thoughts come and go. Their presumption, which even many psychologists share, is that it’s bad to ruminate about thoughts; that you make thoughts real by thinking about them. In Accra, evil is real, and it matters. And it is in part generated by the mind, so you have to clean out the mind. Thought is substantial; it’s not mere thought, it is more important than mere thought.

SBA: And in Chennai?

TML: In Chennai, thought is much more transactional. You are in some ways made as a person through interactions with other people. I haven’t yet figured out how this works religiously. But it’s clear from talking with people with schizophrenia that other people show up in your mind. Your relatives tell you what to do, they give you all these commands, good commands—You should do this, or don’t do this, or clean up, do chores, and so forth. There’s an interactive quality. It’s as if other people have the right to know what’s in your mind, or they do know what’s in your mind. So that’s very different.

SBA: What is the central hypothesis that you’re testing?

TML: That different local theories of mind change the experience of spiritual experiences, of God. I anticipate that people in these different locales will report differently their audible experiences of God, the presence of God, mystical experiences, out of body experiences. That people will talk very differently about prayer, about this daydream-like conversation with God. That there will be a shift in the topography of mental experience.

SBA: I wonder how your own spiritual or magical experiences have shifted your perspective or your desire to do a particular kind of work? You wrote an essay for Frequencies about an experience you had while doing your dissertation research on practitioners of magic in Britain—

TML: I had what I would call a hallucination. I was reading a book about a priestess of Avalon, and there was a lot about druids. And I woke up early in the morning and looked out the window—on the second story—and there were six druids standing there. I saw them. Then I did a double take, and they vanished. But the perceptual experience was a kind of veridical sensory experience. And that really impressed me. It wasn’t the only unusual experience I had while hanging out in that world, but it was the most vivid one. And it persuaded me that this was not about acquiring discourse. I was coming of age in the linguistic turn in anthropology, which focused on the way people used language, how they used and acquired words, the narratives they used, rather than talking about the psychological experiences that their words might represent. There was a shift against psychological experiences. And this was also at the dawning of cognitive science. If I were to describe what I went in looking for, back then—although I didn’t have the words then to describe it—I would say that I went into the world of magic looking for prototypes and schemas and heuristics and narratives and ways in which people cognitively organize their ways of understanding themselves so that they come to experience magic as working. But as it turned out, this was not about heuristics. This was something quite different. And that has altered the course of my intellectual life. I became really interested in training, and the way that spiritual and prayer practices change mental experience.

SBA: How do you think that coming from this position affects your ability—or whatever word you want to use—to yourself have experience while you do this research, and how do you think it colors your interpretation of that experience? Is it less real for you?

TML: I’ve sort of allowed my imaginative experience to become more real. I feel like I have given myself a little bit more freedom as a result of doing this research. But I am not right up there in the high absorption world. I am certainly not somebody through whom words march of their own accord. Really good novelists feel the story move through them, they don’t feel that they are in control of the story—the story happens to them. So, I’m impressed by the capacity to change mental habits, but I am also impressed by how difficult it is. I was part of a prayer group for a couple of years, and I enjoyed the prayer experience a great deal. I would not say that I am now an active pray-er. But I do give myself more freedom to pause and engage in the garden. It’s not as if I have created my own spiritual discipline. When I was doing the experimental work for When God Talks Back, I created a couple of these spiritual discipline tracks that I would use for myself and try to get caught up in the experience. I’m not doing that currently. I probably should.

SBA: You have written that walking and talking with God is “a process through which the loneliest of conscious creatures can come to experience themselves as awash with love.” Does this translate into addressing or beginning to heal late modern or postmodern alienation and anomie, or all the rifts and impoverishments that somebody like Robert Putnam talks about?

TML: I think so. There’s a lot of pushback against Putnam’s data, but I think that there is enough support to feel confident about it. God works as a social relationship in people’s emotional worlds; they hold God as what you might call a “self-object.” We know that when you pop people into a brain scanner and ask them to talk to God, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when you have them talk to their friends or when you engage them in social activity. And I have done quantitative work that shows that the more strongly people affirm the statement, “I feel God’s love for me directly,” the more their loneliness and their stress decrease. So, does this God arise because of increased loneliness? That’s a stronger question. But I’m certainly persuaded that intimacy with God decreases loneliness.

SBA: I wonder if there are any social effects? If all of us were to begin walking and talking with God, would we enter a world that is just as disconnected socially but is experienced as far less lonely, or would that somehow translate into concrete person-to-person connectedness?

TML: In the church it certainly translates. If you go to one of these evangelical churches, one of the things happening is that you are creating very strong social bonds. A third to half of the church, depending of course on the church, meets together in small house groups. And those groups are powerful social engines. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece arguing that membership in the small group was the most powerful predictor of whether people donated money to a church. We at least know that people who are able to imagine God and to have a relationship with God also show up as more empathic, and my guess is that the more able you are to represent God, the more able you are to represent other people. That’s probably socially conscribed—you are probably imagining people in your group rather than other people around the world. This is one way of thinking about different kinds of political stories. People are often struck by the fact that I’m arguing that you can increase your empathy as you increase your relationship with God—but it doesn’t necessarily increase your commitment to social justice politics. What happens if somebody is by themselves and does these prayer practices, do they become more connected to other people? I don’t know. The kind of Dalai Lama-driven, Richard Davidson, Zen Buddhism-is-good-for-you approach would say “yes.” But we do not have that kind of data on kataphatic prayer practices.

SBA: Perhaps this falls under a lack of data, but what do you think about a connection between kataphatic prayer and ethics? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Kripal’s argument that there is no necessary connection between monistic mystical experience and ethics. Do you see ethical frameworks emerging from kataphatic prayer?

TML: I think that the more you feel loved, the more loving you become. We know this from human psychology. There is probably a certain amount of variation in what counts as the person to whom you become more loving. Being able to use your imagination is a content-free activity; you can use your imagination in various ways. If you are using your imagination in a Christian setting, and you’re doing Christian kataphatic prayer, you do more strongly connect to the Jesus of the gospels. Of course, there’s a lot of ethical variation in what that means to people. There probably is a story of increasing your empathy and compassion and concern, and again that’s the Richard Davidson story. But I think it is up for grabs toward whom you increase your compassion. It’s not obvious to me that just because you engage in spiritual practices, that you feel more compassion toward somebody who is not like you.

Indeed, was antebellum America secular?

To answer his title question definitively, yes or no, is to commit oneself to a vision of the present in which religion recedes into oblivion, or flowers, or does battle with its secular other. Definitive answers, moreover, serve a politics of normativity for they help determine the ideas, objects, and persons to be jettisoned, not to mention what views of the world become authoritative, which moral feelings count, and which ones become unaccounted for and forgotten.

Warner engages crucial work on secularity even as he considers the dissolution of the entrenched differential of the religious and the secular. Consequently, Warner’s essay is also incitement for a renewed interrogation of the history of the difference between the religious and the secular and how that difference makes a difference in the lives of individuals—no less for historical actors than for the scholars who study them.

Such interrogations must be rigorous and responsible to the archive but also, at the same time, be deft and willing to account for the precipitous declining ground of secular analysis. Such interrogations, I would add, portend nothing less than a reorientation of historical inquiry.

So although the question of whether antebellum America was secular cannot and should not be taken at face value, it and other similar queries have done much to establish the taken-for-granted status of the differential in many arenas of American life—jurisprudence, corporate culture, mass media, religious institutions, academic environs. What happens, Warner asks, when the categorical difference between the religious and the secular is shown to be historically contingent, politically expedient, and, most perversely, a product of the very era and imaginary this differential is now called upon to analyze? What happens when we possess insight into the making of religion in all of its varied registers yet inhabit a world in which that making has structured the very possibility of our recognition? What happens, as the stowaway Pip so slyly asks, when you unscrew your navel, when the boundary between self and world begins to become undone?

Why this knowledge and why now?

The question of the secular, as I take Warner to suggest, is not merely dizzying. It is, at some level, incomprehensible. And I agree, although I suspect that we have different spins on what incomprehension portends and what the stakes are for analysis.

*   *   *

Warner commends Secularism in Antebellum America for the way in which it illuminates a tension between “analytic distance and normative involvement.” He remains wary, however, of my “Derridean pathos” and flattening of “the complex relations among secularity (constituting the real in a social imaginary and establishing religion as a category), political secularism (a project for regulating religion so conceived), and various forms of ethical secularism.” This is a fair concern (although I would insist that my pathos is Benjaminian) and one that I will not so much counter as qualify with a series of normative claims.

I welcome Warner’s call to distinguish between the background noise from which conceptual patterns of religion take shape, political projects that seek to create these patterns, and the living out and through these patterns. These three analytical distinctions are (and will be) immensely helpful in thinking about a range of contradictions endemic to the secular age and, in particular, the cultivation of selves within discourse and the maintenance of privacy amidst a swirl of conceptual demands. And as Warner himself notes, I, too, have these distinctions in mind.

But I have to admit that analytical differentiation was not my primary concern while writing Secularism. Instead, I sought to tell a story that conjured the dense experiential measures of a secular imaginary circa 1851. Rather than distinguish between the moods and motivations, the institutional directives, and the conceptual atmosphere, I focused on the relationality of concepts across cultural fields—remarkable moments in which abstract workings of discourse channeled through frail human beings.

My book is full of moments in which people experience intensity without an identifiable cause, an affect that is quickly given emotional shape and linguistic form. My narrative strategy was to highlight the experience of agencies from beyond and without as a way to tell a story of how the buffering of selves was achieved by way of one’s vulnerability (and response) to discourse. These are moments, I argued, that secularism got under the skin—not as some dominant force that invades and snatches the body away from you but rather, a moment in which neither the self nor the world was in charge. Or to put this another way, a moment when the self became the self through its exposure to discourse, an exposure that did not boil down to seamless incorporation but generated a complex process in which submission was accompanied by swerve, structuration by negotiation.

In the end, I was interested in framing the particularity of secularism’s excess. Background conditions that were not merely contextual but were agents in a distributive field. For to study secularism is to study those forces that originate in a human world but nonetheless assume an inhuman intensity.

*   *   *

Secularism is about the conditions and processes that generate religion. These conditions are not immediately present to consciousness and these processes structure more than matters of religious adherence. The “location” of these conditions—perhaps even their ontology and mechanics—is a matter of contention (informed as it is by disciplinary location).

In Secularism in Antebellum America I asked a set of questions about these conditions and these processes as they related to a range of Protestant subcultures in the northeast, circa 1851. How did they convince themselves that they were religious or not or somewhere in between? According to what criteria and why? What were the effects of their conviction, for themselves, for others, and for us?

The truth (and falsity) of religion was forged in relation with slaves, Mormons, immigrants, Catholics, and native populations. Violence—real and imagined—against these populations was integral to the making of the secular imaginary I sought to account for, as were internal divisions within the orbits of Anglo-Protestantism. I did not emphasize these conflicts as much as I might have because I was more interested in demonstrating the epiphenomenal nature of conflict—by which I mean the way in which particular conflicts, bloody and real, were effects as much as causes of secularism.

So, for example, those who took violent issue with Joseph Smith’s revelations assumed that some religions were true and some were absolutely not. While Mormonism may have emerged out of the fires of revivalism, antipathy toward Mormons served to consolidate an evangelical public sphere even as the resulting authority of evangelical truth served to naturalize anti-Mormonism beyond evangelical precincts. In taking issue with the truth of Smith’s religion (the excess of his free choice, his literalism applied to a supplemental scripture, the hints of ecstasy and erotics that simmered beneath his pious stance) Mormon haters in Carthage, Illinois participated in the same discursive field in and through which Smith experienced his First Vision in 1820. That spring, in the woods of Manchester, New York, Smith was stuck in the dilemma of voluntarism. As he pondered the question of which church he should join, the golden plates were revealed to him.

*   *   *

Upon examination of different geographic sites, different epistemic registers and social arenas, different language games and institutions, I concluded that the making of religion in antebellum America was a massively normalizing phenomenon. Perhaps even more so than had been previously acknowledged.

I was animated, for example, by the multiplicity of sites where spirituality was being made, encouraged, diagnosed, and promulgated. Spirituality and its advocacy could be found across all manner of sites—from the American Tract Society headquarters on Nassau Street to the colporteur knock on the hinterland door, from the dexterous phrenologist with his calipers to Unitarian sermons, trance lectures, penny presses and etiquette advice manuals, from spirit communiqués and ethnographic encounters to the dreams of prison reformers and their wards, and the burgeoning discipline of moral science. Much went into the making of spirituality as a self-evident faculty of the human. Spirituality, as theorized at mid-century, served to instantiate a sense of potential immunity. Indeed, the “most spiritual man” was “the one most quickened with potential life” according to Universalists [E.F., “Spirituality,” The Universalist Quarterly IX (July 1852)]. Moreover, the conceptual terrain of spirituality fueled all manner of political projects directed at cultivating selves that were porous to the degree that the traffic between self and world was ideally and naturally a matter of self-regulation. Spirituality, in other words, did not so much allow individuals to deny porosity as much as forget it, strategically, in relentless acts of self-cultivation.

Here I witnessed a particular making and deployment of what, according to Charles Taylor, is the defining mark of the secular age—a buffered self. A buffered self is a discrete entity. A buffered self is smart in the brain and free in the person. A buffered self can, therefore, stand at distance from the religious to the degree that religiosity is one choice among many. For Taylor, the buffer is that which cuts across whatever distinction one would like to posit between the religious and the secular. Once located, this buffer “will demand from myself the highest attainable perfection in all things; and will apply negatively, —that I avoid all injury by self-control; and also positively, —that I secure all practicable improvement by self-culture.” The buffer, as a mechanism of self, serves to differentiate between 1) a western world in which individuals choose vis-à-vis the religious and 2) the “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” and oftentimes chose for the individuals in question.

But how did this kind of self emerge as a default setting across the religious-secular continuum? What kinds of desire and force were at play in the making of a buffered situation—a self thinking about itself thinking about the world, from a distance, and a social environment that guaranteed the ability of that self to think, securely, across that distance? What about the constraints that enable the buffer?

Whereas Taylor places a definitive value upon the buffered self and its potential to stave off the world long enough so as to seek what he calls a state of fullness, I am skeptical of the concept of a buffered self—both then and now. I am suspicious of the way in which it feels so damn good, how it makes everyone an artist, how it offers an ironic defense against the algorithms that incessantly call upon us. For it is the buffered self that bolsters a bit too much and gives tremendous advantage as one seeks tactics and subtle strategies of resistance.

So I can appreciate the political freedoms instantiated by all manner of buffering formations: the social contract, provisions against pick-pocketing and leg-breaking, my mortgage, my life insurance, my Amazon wish list, my hyperlinked name at the top of this post, the MRI machines that resonate with my hydrogen nuclei (and erase my credit cards in the process), the designer drugs tailored perfectly to my taste for elliptical perception. But these formations do not resolve my porosity into a bounded commodity to manage and exchange. Their authority depends upon the persistence of my porosity and not its resolution.

And vice versa.

For the buffered self, I contend, is an advertisement, more of a social ritual than ontology. Earnest celebrations of the buffer make it incredibly difficult to sustain conversations about the ways in which the self is subject to the agencies of the object-world, to history, to strangers and expertly branded institutions, to forces that do not announce themselves as such. There is fullness and pleasure to be had in such relays, for better or for worse. As an advertisement that has been wildly successful, the buffered self occludes from consideration the complex conditions of its own possibility. And finally, theoretically, a buffered self leaves little room for the experience of dread, insights into the plurality of worlds we inhabit together, and consideration of the range of agents within those worlds.

*   *   *

Disenchantment is bound up in theses of secularization—a description of feeling and style within modernity as much as a prescription for thinking. Disenchantment is linked, of course, to Max Weber’s classic statement of the diffusion of instrumental rationality. As Weber made clear in “Science as Vocation,” a will to and dependence upon calculation had become a reigning principle, perhaps even an ethical imperative. In a lecture so sharp in its bleakness, Weber diagnoses an acute condition of reason—marked not by certainty per se but by the expectation of certainty. Passionate belief, in other words, is at the heart of disenchantment, namely, the belief in the human ability to rid the world of forces that, if they were to resist calculation, would effect us in incalculable ways. An abiding sense of incomprehension would serve the interests of neither State nor science nor sustained hierarchy.

Under the sign of disenchantment, the world at-large, and especially human being, become subject to efficient calculation to such a degree that the world and the human become means to the ends of organization and systematicity. As a generalization, Weber’s is generally true. But what is most interesting about Weber’s claim, and most in need of elaboration vis-à-vis secularism, is an analysis of the conditions that make such means possible and such ends desirable. For when such critical work is undertaken, we begin to sense that disenchantment is an apt moniker for neither the phenomenological nor sociological registers of modernity. Like the buffered self, disenchantment is a fiercely defended wish, often fulfilled but not a fait accompli.

This point is bound up in my interest in spiritualism as a complex of ritual practice, ideas, and affect. At mid-century evangelicals were horrified by spiritualism which they saw as an irrational and dangerous affirmation of an enchanted world. Spiritualists, in turn, insisted that séances and trance lectures would loosen evangelicals up, curing them of their unhappiness and their insanity. As one spiritualist journal suggested, it was precisely the accounting for ghosts that was the mark of a true best reasonable self—“the influence of Spiritualist teachings not only does not tend to produce insanity, but has a positively counteracting tendency” [The Spiritual Telegraph 1 (1853)].

In the myriad ways in which ghosts were named at mid-century, one can witness the strange play of enchantment and disenchantment that I argue is indicative of the secularity of a long nineteenth century. On one hand, we find throughout the spiritualist archive moments in which individuals sense that their very being was located elsewhere, on the horizon, outside of themselves. In these moments they sensed themselves in the throes of mediation, shot through with something ill defined, that nonetheless determined their present and future states of being. These moments, as strictly defined by the terms of secular modernity, were enchanted. Yet, on the other hand, these moments were indices of future certainty and fodder for ever more elaborate schemes of calculation.

The mid-century metaphysician Andrew Jackson Davis illustrates something about this distant yet effective backdrop of a secular imaginary, against which choices were encountered and decisions were made. Despite the fact that a spirit had instructed Davis that “the Whole System is a volume which even the highest seraph has not altogether read,”  Davis nevertheless offered detailed maps of the Whole. For even if mapping of the spirit-world was ever incomplete, it was the assumption that there was a “Whole” to be mapped that informed spiritualist practice and identity. To paraphrase Alex Owen’s description of British occultism at the fin de siècle, Davis did not recognize the relativism of his own self-reflexivity and could therefore assume his rightful place as lord of the universe.

Davis, like an American Tract Society official or individuals performing a phrenological exam on themselves, held a belief, and that is what it surely is, in the capacity to measure that which was essential, forever and ever, amen. The rendering of the entire universe, visible and invisible, as effectively compatible was also an instance of incredible discursive investment. Everything and everything, according to Davis, could and should be mapped. It was not the instantiation of systematicity as much as it was the promotion of it as an object of worship.

Warner suggests that one implication of my work is that the “literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting [ ] in technological society.” I would qualify this by saying that it was not simply technology but the discourse of secularism (in and through which machines and mechanical metaphors assumed their strength) that was intensely felt yet never exactly present.

To appreciate the strange ontology of discourse I drew from the testimony of historical actors. I took seriously their visions of haunted terrains and the invisible mechanics of body, mind, and much else. For when alone, at rest “a sweet sense of estrangement begins to creep over me. In such a case, it is truly most delightful to see how sweetly what is left behind insinuates its presence. The walk, the solitary chamber even, are haunted unawares by a feeling which must be called social . . . which is, in fact, a very present presence.” On one level, encounters with “very present” presences were enchanting in the Charles Taylor (and Edward Burnett Tylor) sense—a survival of what we imagine to be primitive proclivities. On another level, such encounters followed a Weberian script of disenchantment in which wonder and dread were evacuated in the name of measured explanation. When incomprehension began to set in, so, too, did the work of parrying it. Yet on still another level, such encounters were not encounters at all. They were matters of enchantment in which the self did not simply experience an inert object world but found oneself in relation to it, mediated by it, and in some weak sense, determined by it.

*   *   *

So Warner is right to point out that bloody, violent religious dissent is largely missing from my story—for there were indeed robust and deeply-felt antagonisms that I do not discuss at any length. My interest in the saturated phenomena of secularism led to different questions concerning how antagonistic positions can serve larger historical trajectories. There was, indeed, a politics to all this spirit-seeing—exclusions and closures that were real yet did not always leave a mark.

For ways of knowing and unknowing, of overcoming the limits of the visible with nothing but the promise of disenchantment, of keeping the incomprehensible at bay through a relentless desire to calculate—bore directly on the management of various populations and the lives within.  Rather than a flattening I would like to think of my chronicle of antebellum epistemics as staging the consequential turns in which selves are affected in ordinary ways by the conceptual terrain of the religious even as they deploy these concepts well beyond their immediate interests. Within the political projects forwarded by John Edmonds and Eliza Farnham (prison reform at Sing Sing State Penitentiary) and Lewis Henry Morgan (anthropology and Indian removal), the art of governance was suffused with existential navigations, ethical binds, as well as the imagination of racial difference. In each of these situations, whiteness reigned. Racial difference was an epiphenomenon of secularism, namely a common sense linkage of true religion with right morality with an essential humanity with whiteness. This linkage was manifest in the cat o’ nine tails at Sing Sing and the legal seizures of native lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, proving, perhaps, that people can bleed and die by the force of the epiphenomenal.

*   *   *

As one studies the making of the religious/secular continuum and the exclusions that support its normativity, one can quickly find oneself writing from a position of pious skepticism. Secularization theses, and more specifically, the secular and the breadth and scope of its truth claims become foreboding in their immanence, in the ways in which they seem to structure so much of one’s analytical choice with so little fanfare. One, therefore, cannot be shy, methodologically or theoretically, when approaching such a theologico-politico-social scheme.

The study of secularism, among other things, gives lie to the old differential saws of structure and agency, cognition and culture. It forces us, among other things, to reconsider the very suppositions of critique as secular.

So I plead guilty to Warner’s charge of standing in awe, of seeking to appreciate (and conjure) something that escapes my analytical frame. But does such pathos, as Warner suggests, “project[ ] from its own powerlessness a problem that cannot be addressed, and before which one can only stand in a vaguely radical appreciation of the tragic”? Well, yes and no.

Secularism does not exist wholly beyond the feelings, principles, and practices it authorizes. However, some part of its logic escapes our sensory orbit, out-imagining our capacity to imagine it, to name it, to grasp in its immensity. This kind of strange ontology cannot be exposed like a garden-variety object of Enlightenment critique. It can be neither cut up nor quarantined nor assayed after dutiful collection.

Herman Melville suggested that such tragic appreciation had its reasons and was the mark of our supple humanity. For Melville, original sin was a condition of permanent enchantment, a condition that could not be overcome as much as continually assessed. (Melville’s perspective was an affirmation of the “pasts” of Edwardsian Calvinism, primitivism, and Catholicism that so many Americans were in the process of defining themselves against at mid-century).  As a matter of metaphysics and writerly conceit, Melville assumed that people were, in part, constituted by powers beyond their epistemic purview—“infinite socialities” that demanded that humans struggle to do the impossible: move beyond mere humanism. “There lies the knot with which we choke ourselves,” wrote Melville. “As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.”

These lines served as my own writerly conceit in Secularism. Indeed, they reminded me of my own failure to grasp the socialities within me, eliciting both suspicion and sympathy for those who claimed otherwise. If grasping for the precision of system is endemic to a secular age, I sought, instead, to provide a diagnosis, and on more illusory, manic days, an anecdote to what Brian Massumi calls the “preconversion of surprise into cognitive confidence.” For what I wanted to conjure was how secularity, political secularism, and ethical secularism swirl together in a seemingly unfathomable mix, which is to say at the level of the historical actor and historian alike.

*   *   *

There is no outside from which to objectify and to take the measure of secularity. No single inquiry can gain definitive leverage uponthe massive yet intricate mechanics of how religion—as faculty, phenomenon, mood, and category—gets real. A range of perspectives is required. Consequently, I see a necessary (but not exclusive) role for genealogical approaches to the secular age. The “entangled and confused parchments” must be given their due even as one seeks analytic purchase upon different layers and different moments of the secular age. In tacking back and forth between an appreciation for the excess of systems and the necessary work of systemization, there is a productive (and dialectical) tension to be had in all of this subterranean earnestness.

Perhaps this dialectic is a disciplinary inheritance of religious studies, ever inhabiting what Leigh Schmidt has referred to as the charged space between suspicion and sympathy, itself a product of the intellectual environs of nineteenth-century America. So perhaps it comes down not to an individual choice between suspicion or sympathy, but rather an embrace of both under the canopy of a future field.

As Warner’s provocation makes clear, scholarship on secularity must offer a sustained engagement with the complexity of the situation and its complicity in that complexity. Such immanent criticism “pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself.” If future critics of secularity were to follow this melody laid down by Theodor Adorno—own up to it boys and girls!—they would seek the impossible: to draw from the inheritance of secular critique while simultaneously resisting its allure.

According to Adorno, “A successful work [of] immanent criticism is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict ‘mere ideology’ loses its meaning. At the same time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains a reflection, without altering the existence of which its failure bears witness.”

In light of this inevitable failure to grasp, from within, the making of an immanent frame, how to continue to write without buying into the reality of belief or the buffer between you and me, me and the archive, you and the archive? What kinds of sentences might yet achieve a hint of leverage—not upon the thicket, the blur, this secularism—but rather in light of it?

Bronwyn Leebaw, in her post, notes that I seek to stave off the fate of Sophie Wilder, a character in a novel who converts to Catholicism then becomes estranged from her friends and family. Mirabile dictu, unlike Sophie Wilder, my book has met with great efforts to understand it, absorb it, and engage it thoughtfully, this at the hands of six reviewers each of whose own scholarship has contributed crucially to the contemporary conversation about the justice of dealing with past injustice. I am grateful. I am heartened, too, that each reviewer fundamentally “got” the book, grasping and in many ways finding sympathy with what I strove to argue.

The disagreements, though, are more interesting in a forum like this one so herein I focus on them. Two main criticisms appear in the reviews. Both concern the application of the ethic to the real world. One has to do with the overlapping consensus I have sought to construct among four schools and traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the restorative justice movement. Leebaw, Colleen Murphy, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Alex Bellamy question whether this consensus leaves out many other traditions and perspectives in the realm of transitional justice. Mark Freeman states a different version of the criticism in asking whether I stretch the terms of the argument too widely in trying to accommodate multiple perspectives. The second has to do with the ethic’s aspiration to holism. Is it not utopian? Murphy, Leebaw, and Vinjamuri each ask this question in different ways, worrying that the ethic is unable to provide guidance, resolve dilemmas, or handle backlash, adverse effects, political manipulation, and other problems of politics as usual.

Let us begin with the question of consensus. Murphy doubts that the ethic will receive the endorsement of secularists who do not subscribe to restorative justice, while Vinjamuri believes the same is true for a range of “local traditions and customs,” “many faith traditions,” some liberals, the Burmese, and communities that have mediated human rights in locally particular ways.

Consensus, however, is not the first or most important criteria by which my ethic—or any ethic—ought to be judged. As Murphy recognizes, my ethic has two tasks, the first of which is prior to the second. This first task is to set forth and defend a concept of justice. This concept, like any other ethic, whether that of Confucius, Kant, or Averroes, should be accepted or rejected, endorsed or argued with on its merits, not on whether a given set of people agree with or disagree with it. A valid criticism of this first task would be, “this is not an adequate notion of justice because it omits, contradicts, fails to specify,” and the like, and not simply “this or that group thinks differently.” The purpose of an ethic, after all, is to judge, practices, actions, and other concepts of justice. This would not be possible if the ethic found “agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument,” to use Freeman’s phrase. Just as we would not expect advocates of racial equality to seek agreement with segregationists or religious freedom with defenders of blasphemy codes, so we should not judge an ethic of restorative justice inadequate because it fails to find agreement with, say a consequentialist or a balance retributivist (two of the competing conceptions that I outline in the book). Now, the disagreement between my ethic of political reconciliation and its interlocutors is not as sharp as in these examples; some of the reviewers remark upon my efforts to find common ground with other points of view. I make these efforts indeed. Still, disagreements there are—with liberalism, consequentialism, balance retributivism, opponents of forgiveness, “agonistic” theorists, and other points of view. Whether the zone of disagreement with these other views can be reduced depends, as with any argument about ethics, on what sort of persuasion takes place in conversation among the viewpoints, not on whether the ethic converges with positions that exist prior to the conversation.

It is only once the substance of the ethic has been developed—the job of the first task—that I am interested in trying to show that it can command widespread endorsement. Because the ethic is generated from particular religious traditions and a school of justice, and because I hope that it will have wide applicability around the globe, I am interested to show that it might achieve endorsement beyond any one of these traditions. Leebaw argues that I draw from the Christian tradition more than any other. She is right; I do. I then try to show that the core commitments of the ethic—its notions of justice, peace and mercy—find resonance in the Jewish tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the restorative justice school of thought. Restorative justice is important because it has secular articulations and thus shows that the ethic is expressible in secular terms—an important trait if the ethic is to travel to the United Nations or organizations that typically operate in secular terms.

It is not my aim, though, that the ethic will be practiced only among these traditions. For the sake of realism I choose to develop this group of traditions. The framework of overlapping consensus, though, is one in which other traditions might join. In my travels in Africa, I have discovered numerous tribal traditions whose rituals and practices of reconciliation deeply resonate with the ethic of political reconciliation. They are holistic and involve several interconnected practices, many of which are the same as those in the ethic. One of the greatest theorists of restorative justice, Australia’s John Braithwaite, argues that restorative justice is the approach to dealing with the past that resonates with the vast majority of the world’s cultures and religions over the course of history. This is a big claim whose validity I am unable to evaluate. But if Braithwaite is even close to being correct, then the potential for overlapping consensus is strong.

None of this is to deny the challenge and the likelihood of partial results in finding resonance on the ethic among traditions. Traditions themselves contain internally conflicting schools; in the book I note these in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as dimensions of the ethic in which convergence between these entire traditions will fall short. It is difficult to say ex ante, prior to the hard work of searching for mutual resonance,how much convergence between the ethic and any given tradition will be possible. No tradition will converge fully. As Murphy and Vinjamuri rightly note, many ethics will not sign on given their currently extant beliefs, prior to a conversation in which mutual persuasion is attempted. Most importantly, the pursuit of consensus, the object of the second task, is a pursuit based upon a fixed set of commitments, those developed in the first task. Given these commitments, given that they will converge and diverge with the range of views out there in the world, how wide can the zone of agreement be extended?

The real world is also the subject of the other major concern raised in the symposium. I do not account adequately, the criticism runs, for what will likely happen when the practices hit politics: backlash, backfire, manipulation, strategic use on the part of the powerful, and breakdown in moving from practice to product. The ethic’s notion of justice is too encompassing of everything to make hard choices and resolve dilemmas about anything and is unable to show in what sequence practices ought to be adopted. My response is threefold.

First it is all true! That is, politics is replete with all of these dynamics. I might add to my interlocutors’ litany the constraints imposed by the balance of power between rivals during a transition as well as the effects of time, over which possibilities for justice expand and contract. Here it is worth quoting a passage from the book:

Commending reconciliation does not deny the difficulty of reconciliation any more than advocacy of human rights or economic equality denies that both of these values are massively violated in the world today. One practice but not another will occur in one country while another combination of practices will occur in another country; any practice will occur in pieces and in parts and will remain imperfect and fragmentary. While the justifications for the practices will show how, in principle, they might be restorative, none of these rationales warrants assurance that these restorations will be successful where citizens have suffered colossal injustices. Political reconciliation will be compromised by the obstructions of the powerful, the destruction of institutions, the chaos of the aftermath of war and dictatorship, and by the simple complexity of the practices. (61)

I might add that I argue for political reconciliation, the kind that applies to citizens in the political sphere, and not comprehensive reconciliation, relevant to all of life. Political reconciliation is more circumscribed and limited and less ambitious.

I suspect, though, that my interlocutors will not be satisfied by my admission that the ethic will be partially achieved. They seem to be asking that my theory predict, explain, and provide guidance through these complexities. I am doubtful, though, that this is possible, precisely because of the utter complexity and variability of these factors. Let me add to the above litany of breakdown a further complexity: the real world is also replete with breakthroughs. Though all of the six practices in my ethic are fraught in their application, all of them have taken place abundantly all over the world in the past generation: truth commissions, reparations settlements, apologies, acts of forgiveness, trials, and so on. In my reading of the cases, I discovered that along with unintended effects and perverse incentives, there are truth commissions for which polls show victims approving, cases of victims whose demand for revenge is dampened by effective acknowledgment, acts of forgiveness that victims report as healing and that sometimes change the hearts of perpetrators, and so on.

Once the range of malfunctions and successes alike are factored in, it becomes an extremely ambitious task to account for what sort of dynamic is going to obtain in what sort of situation. I do make some limited claims about sequence. For instance, I note that practices like forgiveness and acknowledgment best take place after a war has ended or a dictatorship has fallen. This is a weak claim, though, and even it is too simple. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa espoused reconciliation even during the struggle against apartheid, a theme that would have great effects after the transition. Even the premise behind sequencing—that events are discrete phenomenon with a clear beginning and end—may prove questionable.

It is really social scientific knowledge that is needed to understand these dynamics of application, not ethical reasoning, which is the sort that I take on in the book. Perhaps social scientists will make progress in offering strong and useful generalizations about what sort of dynamics obtain under what sort of conditions. In that case, ethics and social science could be complementary. Vinjamuri, for example, has done valuable comparative case study work showing that trials undertaken during war rarely facilitate and often hinder the achievement of piece—a useful thing to know. Still, my sense of the potential of social science to yield broad generalizations—a sense that I have developed in over two decades in political science—is that even the best empirical work will not yield laws and patterns that are strong and robust enough to tame the vastly situational judgment that decisionmakers must bring to their choices. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but this is my strong sense.

Does this mean, then, that the framework is so vague, abstract, and removed from political reality that it provides no guidance? Such a conclusion would be disappointing, for one of my hopes for the book is that it would reduce the gap between theory and practice. My second response to my interlocutors is that the ethic does in fact provide significant guidance for just action. It cannot and should not supplant the zone of choice in which a decisionmaker must apply prudential judgment but it does point the way to some approaches rather than others. What the ethic does for the justice of dealing with the past is much analogous to what the just war theory does for war. Its norms definitively rule out some courses of action like the intentional killing of innocents and preventive war and offer other criteria for action like proportionality, last resort, and right intention. Even these criteria, especially the latter ones, leave substantial room for judgment as to whether they are fulfilled, while no criterion can substitute for strategy, battle plans, or the likely effects of choosing one course of action over another. Even if a given attack is just in principle, will it likely inflame the enemy population into a debilitating counterattack? Even if a plan secures a just victory, will its losses so harm the morale of the troops that the war will be lost and its just cause defeated? No ethic can answer such questions. I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in bequeathing them to the virtue of prudence. Still, though, the ethic provides criteria that will rule out some choices and narrow down others. It certainly provides far more criteria than Realism’s open-ended notion of the national interest.

So if my ethic of reconciliation provides concrete guidance, of what does this consist? Here are eleven illustrative resultant conclusions:

1) We should reject a “cheap reconciliation” that lacks human rights, the rule of law, accountability and other values. This stands as a sharp critique to numerous leaders who have advocate reconciliation in just these terms.

2) The ethic has an answer to the question of amnesty and the dilemma of peace vs. justice. It says that amnesty is always a sacrifice of justice but one that might be justified (though still as a second best) if necessary to secure peace or a transition to democracy and that ought to be accompanied by other restorative measures.

3) We should reject the dichotomy of punishment vs. forgiveness that has been deployed by a wide range of practitioners in the international community, usually to the detriment of forgiveness. Showing how these practices are compatible opens the door to a wider practice of forgiveness (judicial punishment already has strong support).

4) The ethic also addresses numerous other objections to forgiveness that stand in the way of its advocacy and practice.

5) Community justice forums as a mode of practicing punishment ought to be expanded and improved (while less ought to be expected from the International Criminal Court).

6) Apology and reparations are complementary. One ought not to be practiced without the other. Examples show victims rightly complaining when one appear in isolation.

7) Reparations ought to focus less on restoring victims to their status quo ante and focus more on acting as a symbolic communication. This has implications for determining reparations’ magnitude and mode of delivery.

8) Acknowledgment is at its best when it involves victims in an active, personal way. Local community forums perhaps perform this best. A commission that offers a report in which victims are little but statistics performs this worst.

9) Collective apology is ethically justifiable but ought to respect the right to dissent from it.

10) Collective forgiveness, a practice that is rare, is justifiable and might become more widespread.

11) It is entirely appropriate for religious actors and religious actors to be involved in transitional justice; the record shows that they have much to offer in terms of leadership and resources. They should not be sidelined by secular arguments for “public reason.”

Again, none of these conclusions can tell us, say, when a leader should agree to amnesty rather than continue to fight and pursue prosecution, what to do in the face of backlash and denial, and the like. The conclusions do offer judgments, though, that favor some courses of action and disfavor others and that ally with some existing paradigms and stand opposed to others.

Third and finally, we do well to remember that the purpose of ethics is not simply to prescribe specific courses of action. One of its purposes is to guide judgment and assessment, whether or not one is directly involved in the action. Again, a passage from the book, this one from the conclusion, helps to make the point:

What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive violation? I chose this as my framing question for a deliberate reason: because justice matters for its own sake, as an end in itself, even apart from whether or how often it is enacted and with what results. To hasten to results is to ignore this intrinsic importance or else to adopt, perhaps unreflectively, an ersatz consequentialism. Two friends sit in a café hotly debating the death penalty. Neither is an employee in the criminal justice system, an activist, or a friend or relative of a victim or defendant. Their country’s death penalty laws are not about to change; each of their votes matter infinitesimally. Still they argue, cajole, and rejoin, ever more heatedly. It matters to them a great deal what sort of justice their government renders, what sort of society in which they live. Conversations like this one take place continuously, ubiquitously, over innumerable issues. To the people who engage in them, justice matters. Justice matters all the more if one believes, with philosopher John Rawls, that it is the first virtue of social institutions. (286)

In countries confronting past injustices and seeking to move forward, too, thousands of ordinary people simply want to know how to think about justice. They turn to their frameworks, religious, cultural, and philosophical. So, the frameworks are important.

Even for those involved in the action, though, ethics is not simply a matter of making hard choices and confronting difficult dilemmas, though it is importantly that. It is also a matter of reconceiving the field of possibilities, of thinking creatively and expansively so as to open up pathways that might not have been conceived otherwise. Thinking of justice, peace, and mercy in a new way does not merely show us what move to make within a game but also helps to restructure the game—that is, the ends and means of politics. As Nukhet Sandal recognizes most directly, this is what I believe religious traditions can help us do.

Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

One of Philpott’s goals in Just and Unjust Peace is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” (3). This is the question that has been at the center of ongoing debates on transitional and international justice, but Philpott goes about addressing it in a wholly original way. Instead of grounding the inquiry in a preliminary engagement with prevailing international legal standards, he begins by articulating a general theoretical approach to justice and reconciliation, and then uses it to examine contemporary institutions and practices.

The result is an impressive and rewarding discussion that addresses debates on transitional justice, as well as debates on the role of religion in international politics. Philpott’s theory of justice emerges as a grand synthesis of traditions and goals that are routinely taken to be in conflict with one another. He rejects the opposition of forward-looking and backward-looking approaches to justice, calling for practices that are “Janus-faced, peering in both directions” (6). He dismisses the persistent view that the pursuit of justice is in tension with the goal of political reconciliation, insisting that justice must encompass reconciliation and that any ethically grounded conception of political reconciliation must also entail a commitment to justice. At the same time, Philpott proposes a theoretical approach that aims to bridge the gulf between religious and secular responses to injustice.

Philpott addresses claims asserting the incompatibility of religion and rights by suggesting that such claims tend to be premised on the view that religious believers invariably identify their ethics with a kind of argument by fiat, such as, “policy X is ordained by the Lord and that is that!” (111). This kind of logic, insists Philpott, is typical of bad religious arguments, but not religious arguments per se, adding that “we do well to remember that there are secular forms of these arguments too” (111). He reminds readers that the international humanitarian legal tradition emerged out of Christian theological writings on just war theory and that religious activists have played an important role in various struggles to expand civil and human rights.

At the same time Philpott takes on the claim, prominent in liberal political thought, that political argumentation must be expressed in a secular “public” language. To exclude religious rationales from the process of public justification, he argues, implies that people should offer rationales other than the ones that actually motivate them in efforts to defend their political views. As an alternative, Philpott proposes an approach to integrating religious and secular ethics that is grounded in what he calls “rooted reason”—one that invites those motivated by religion to present their full rationales, but also insists that they remain open to alternative views and be capable of re-expressing their ethics in a secular language. The goal he envisions is a “mutual resonance, involving a reciprocal back-and-forth process of comparison and efforts at mutual understanding” (21).

From this starting point, Philpott seeks to ground his approach to justice in an “overlapping consensus” between the liberal tradition and ideas drawn from ancient texts in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. In a series of chapters dedicated to examining ideas from each tradition, Philpott relies primarily on ancient texts for guidance, with less attention to the way that living traditions and contemporary religious practices might inform responses to the specific problem of political injustice. The theoretical framework that emerges seems to be organized around a discussion of reconciliation that is drawn largely from the Christian tradition, while works from the other traditions are mined for potentially compatible ideas. It seems to me that the kind of mutual understanding Philpott calls for in his preliminary chapters would benefit from greater attention to what might be learned from unique and conflicting approaches to framing the problems that he sets out to address. Nevertheless, these chapters make for interesting and evocative reading.

Just and Unjust Peace advocates a restorative approach to justice that addresses the “wounds of political injustice,” conceived broadly as encompassing violations of human rights, harms to persons, lack of knowledge about political injustices, and the absence of acknowledgment from officials. In keeping with restorative justice principles, Philpott’s approach encompasses harms or damage experienced by the wrongdoer as well. To this list, Philpott adds the wounds inflicted by the “standing victory” of the wrongdoer’s injustice. Philpott argues, given that political injustices are associated with a particular political order or program, the failure to effectively oppose or defeat that political order will continue to be experienced as a wound by its victims.

Philpott grounds his theory of justice in ethics and principles, but articulates it as an array of practices aimed at ameliorating these various wounds. Such practices, he argues, ideally ought to include efforts to build socially just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment, and forgiveness. Philpott’s discussion of these practices offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that has sought to measure the impact of individual transitional justice through statistical analysis of cross-national data. “The practices complement one another, complete one another, and weave together,” he argues (174). The implied critique of a certain emphasis on isolating and measuring the impact of individual transitional justice mechanisms reminded me of Michael Pollan’s response to nutrition science. The problem with the kind of approach, Philpott suggests, is that it can blind us to the complicated and dynamic ways that various strategies work together synergistically.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is on the theme of punishment, which makes an important theoretical intervention in ongoing debates on restorative justice and legalism. These debates have tended to position restorative justice in opposition, not only to prosecution, but also to retributive rationales for punishment. Philpott rejects this opposition. He offers a compelling case that retribution is a dimension of restorative justice and one of its most important moral responses to political injustice. At the same time, he takes on those who have attempted to analyze the role of war crimes trials only in relation to their impact on goals such as improvement in human rights practices, stability, democratic change, or deterrence. The fundamental problem with this essentially consequentialist approach, Philpott observes simply, is that it “does not deal with the past” (91). Indeed, it is a strange thing to consider that the literature on transitional justice, an arena of study and practice that emerged in connection with the goal of “dealing with the past,” has increasingly identified “success” with achievements that have very little to do with the quality of their response to past wrongs. Philpott counters this trend by making the case for the integrity of retribution as a moral response to political injustice, while also rejecting the “inordinate focus on incarceration,” characteristic of Western criminal justice systems (65). He does so by situating the role of punishment in the larger context of efforts to pursue reintegration and repair.

Philpott’s theoretical approach is so holistic that one gets the feeling that many of the questions or potential criticisms that one might raise for him would likely be acknowledged and then swallowed up into his grand theoretical framework. This quality enriches the book, but is also one of its vulnerabilities. There is integrity in the way that Philpott engages his theoretical interlocutors. In presenting his own arguments, he takes care to identify and acknowledge what is most compelling in the strongest opposing view. In making the case for forgiveness as a practice of justice, for example, he begins with the voice of Francine, a victim of the Rwandan genocide, whose narrative immediately reveals how absurd—even obscene—appeals for forgiveness can appear to those who have survived atrocities. Such passages model the kind of “ethic of engagement” that he takes to be integral to the goal of establishing dialogue across lines of conflict and belief.

In addressing various critics, however, Philpott never seems to name or fully confront what is perhaps the most significant challenge animating various debates on the theme of addressing political injustice: the threat of backlash. Political injustices are defined here as violations or deviations from international norms, but they are also, importantly, crimes of obedience. Despite all of the various forms that they take, political injustices share certain features as a result. These are abuses that have been rationalized, normalized, or legalized by officials under a prior order, and actively or tacitly supported by a significant portion of a population. Efforts to acknowledge such wrongs as wrongs, let alone punish those who committed them, are invariably met with backlash and denial to varying degrees.

Most, if not all, of the positions that Philpott engages here, most theoretical debates on transitional justice, have taken shape in response to this particular challenge. The potential threat of backlash and denial is the main reason that scholars have perceived the goals of peace, or reconciliation, and justice to be in tension with one another. The “peace versus justice” debate, in all of its many forms, is premised on the view that peace requires some form of preliminary effort to address the potentially volatile forces of denial. The persistence of efforts to deny or rationalize past wrongs is one reason that so much attention is given to truth commissions as a mechanism for addressing political injustice. It is also the reason that many scholars and policymakers have suggested that forward-looking responses to the past may be in tension with backward-looking responses. Calls for retribution, acknowledgement, and apologies in response to past wrongs are blamed for stirring up conflict and destabilizing the peace precisely because they aspire to challenge persistent forms of denial.

Philpott’s assertion that these debates are positioned around false dichotomies depends on his having set such problems aside. As it is elaborated, the model seems to envision a world in which those who supported the political injustices in question have already come to appreciate that they were in the wrong. In such a world, the message of censure associated with punishment or acknowledgement should not be rejected as illegitimate “victor’s justice” as long as these responses are conducted in accordance with established norms and certain procedural guidelines. Although Philpott recognizes that any remedy for political injustice must begin with efforts to establish just institutions, the theory says little about the fact that it is due to the persistent threat of backlash that such efforts have often been associated with compromises on backward-looking responses to political injustice. The model also sidesteps the question of how transitional justice practices may be manipulated, limited, and utilized strategically by those in power, or how they have been in many of the exemplary cases that he discusses.

How, then, should the forces of denial and backlash be addressed in efforts to remedy political injustice? If Just and Unjust Peace avoids a direct response to this question, it offers three indirect responses. First, the broader logic of the argument presented in Just and Unjust Peace seems to suggest that the most promising way to resolve such conflicts, as well as conflicts regarding the role of religion in politics, is to begin by focusing on points of possible convergence rather than difference, and that from this starting point, a foundation for common understanding might be established and deepened over time. There is wisdom in this suggestion, but it raises a difficult question. When does such an approach provide a foundation for bridging differences and when does it function instead to avoid conflict or mask compromise? Second, Philpott sometimes seems to suggest that, working together synergistically, the various practices of justice that he enumerates will function to effectively neutralize those who continue to deny or rationalize past wrongs. For example, punishment conducted in the restorative mode advocated here, situated in the context of broader measures aimed at advancing reconciliation and repair, might be less likely to trigger hostile backlash than punishment conducted with the goal of stigmatizing or excluding. This is a useful suggestion, but I think it minimizes the intensity of backlash that often accompanies even minor forms of acknowledgment. Ultimately, if they are to function as he suggests they should, Philpott’s practices of justice must be accompanied by significant political struggle and transformation.

The third way that Just and Unjust Peace addresses the problem of backlash is the most interesting to me. In a larger sense, the book may be read as insisting upon the value of articulating an ethic of justice and reconciliation that is held at a remove from calculations regarding backlash, power dynamics, or ongoing rationalizations of abuse and violence. Like Socrates in his response to Thrasymachus, the book insists on the importance of disentangling our discussions of what justice might mean from the manner in which it has been institutionalized, and hold such discussions at something of a remove from our assessments of what is possible or practical at a given time. For all of its attention to empirical studies and professed pragmatism, Just and Unjust Peace is, in that sense, a visionary exercise. It outlines an ethic that is “not so much a solution to evil as it is a response…that in the political realm will always be partially achieved” (5).

Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic.

It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape.

The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law.

Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one.

Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King.

All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups.

For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

To read of “robust polyphony” among evangelicals was especially welcome to me, as I addressed this phenomenon in a recent ethnography, Emerging Evangelicals (NYU Press, 2011). As a cultural anthropologist, I explored the identities fashioned, practices performed, histories claimed, institutions created, and critiques waged among evangelicals influenced by the Emerging Church movement. Pally’s astute analysis returned me to a question I stopped short of fully developing: does fragmentation equal change?

While it is clear that evangelicalism is diversifying, it is unclear what this amounts to. We see voting blocs split, financial donations broaden, volunteer labor disperse, and moral-political agendas expand. But, do these fragmentations signal tectonic, hard-wired, all-bets-are-off cultural change? Or, is it more superficial (which is not to say unimportant or not deeply felt) social change? Do electoral politics and other shifting forms of activism amount to fundamental change, or merely changing patterns of action?

Briefly, consider one example: evangelical anti-human trafficking campaigns. This is not an example Pally cites, but it exemplifies her point about a diversifying consciousness. Evangelicals, in step with other faith-based and secular actors, are devoting increasing attention to the global problem of labor and sex trafficking. A thorough canvassing of evangelical anti-trafficking would be most welcome: how many organizations exist, how much money they raise, where in the world they work, and so forth. But, the more vital qualitative question is what cultural materials evangelicals use to conceptualize and conduct anti-trafficking activism. Consider a representative organization. Unearthed, a film ministry founded in 2009, culminates its lead documentary with: “Even if we were to rescue every victim of sex trafficking today, there’s still gonna be a demand for millions and millions and millions of new slaves tomorrow. Because at the root of sexual exploitation is a demand, and it’s driven by men. If we want to change this thing systemically, if we want to stamp it out at the root, what men want at the deepest level, like their hearts and their desires, have to be changed.”

Does this hint at a profoundly different evangelicalism? I would say ‘no,’ because the organizing cultural logic is individualist, moralist, and male-centered. Unearthed relies on a thin model of agency. If men stop masturbating to pornography, going to strip clubs, and paying prostitutes for sex, then human trafficking will grind to a halt. Females – and, strikingly, a wide range of females – have little to no agency: an adult exotic dancer and a 10-year old sex slave are imagined as much the same. Moreover, the structures that create the conditions for and reproduce trafficking are systematically undervalued in the discourse of organizations like Unearthed. Global poverty, hunger, labor demands, punitive and legal policy, and transnational migration routes are scarcely mentioned or completely absent.

The fragmenting of evangelical activism is undeniably important. However, we must be cautious in what we make of it. As the case of anti-trafficking suggests, it would be easy to mistake a “new” evangelical cause for a “new” evangelicalism. We need clear theories of cultural change to make proper sense of shifting ground. What kind of re- project are we witnessing: a re-organizing of existing evangelical culture, or a re-making?

As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.