Secularism Is Complicated: the most crucial challenge to the promise of secularism—ie, that by separating church and state, religion became restricted only to the private sector. While it is true that secularization did happen at a specific point in European history (thus resulting in the Church being formally removed from political rule in Eu... See more

It feels implausible to imagine we will return to religion in its current form en masse, so we are in this curious post-secular state where socially and politically we need the emphasis on solidarity, practice and experience previously found in religion to defend the integrity of the public realm, but culturally and intellectually we can’t go back ... See more

Strauss therefore argued that political philosophy must re-open the “theological-political problem” rather than declare it settled. That does not mean re-imposing dogma; it means rediscovering, through thinkers such as Plato, Maimonides, and even Hobbes and Spinoza at their best, the ways in which reason and revelation, liberty and moral limits, ca... See more