Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has maintained that the contemporary regime of tolerance has its roots in the ideological and political settlements that followed the devastating wars of religion in the aftermath of the Reformation. Because Protestants and Catholics couldn’t adjudicate their disputes about doctrine, religious practice, and authority thr

Religion, I argued, is born of the human being’s essentially unlimited capacity to quest, both intellectually and spiritually. Far from shutting down the mind—as is so often claimed by its critics—religion expands the mind and pushes it ever further, toward a properly infinite goal.

authentic faith is not, in fact, infrarational; it is suprarational. The infrarational—what lies below reason—is the stuff of credulity, superstition, naiveté, or just plain stupidity, and no self-respecting adult should be the least bit interested in fostering or embracing it. It is quite properly shunned by mature religious people as it is by sci

They must come to understand—and put into practice—the convictions that authentic faith is not opposed to reason; that scientism must be put to rest; that mere toleration must not be tolerated; that voluntarism must be eschewed; and that opponents must seek to really listen to one another. As an exemplar of these various intellectual and moral virt

What commenced in Locke gained momentum throughout the modern period. One thinks of the move in the nineteenth century, so abhorred by John Henry Newman, to exclude religion from the circle of academic disciplines on the presumption that religion had to do with private and subjective matters.

I’m convinced that a dumbed-down religion, practiced across the denominational divides for about the past fifty years, has been a disaster.

Though it can be practiced privately, religion must not intrude upon the open and secular debate of the public arena.

Locke, persuasively enough, argued that religious toleration was good for religion, since no authentic conversion can be compelled through legal constraint. And he held that such broad acceptance is legitimate precisely because the goal of the state (fostering the common public good) and the goal of religion (the saving of souls) are qualitatively

irrational fideism