to have secular faith is to acknowledge that we are essentially dependent on—and answerable to—other persons who cannot be mastered or controlled, since we are all free, finite beings.

What I call religious faith, then, is characterized by the attempt to convert us from our secular faith, since this faith makes us vulnerable to irrevocable loss. To have religious faith is to disown our secular faith in a fragile form of life. Religious faith holds that our ultimate aim should be to transcend the finitude we share.

If this body is “resurrected,” it is not because it ascends to heaven or is transformed into an incorruptible body, but because it is commemorated by those who love him, compelled to remember him precisely because he died and thereby allowing him to live on, in a process of communion that itself is subject to dissolution and death.

To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our li

This religious consummation does not fulfill the wishes that animated their love and their lives; it rather obliterates them, as they are literally lost in the rapture of God.

A secular reconciliation, by contrast, recognizes that “there is nothing degrading about being alive” (as Hegel puts it in a poignant phrase).77 Being vulnerable to pain, loss, and death is not a fallen condition but inseparable from being someone for whom something can matter.

What I call religious faith is any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.

analytical definitions are the following. What I call social democracy comprises any form of socialism or Marxism that limits itself to redistribution and does not grapple with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. Democratic socialism, by contrast, requires a fundamental and practical revaluation of the capitalist measure of

At stake here is my ability to judge that my time is being wasted and that I myself am wasting my time. The ability to make such judgments—and the concomitant risk of existential crisis—is inseparable from the exercise of my spiritual freedom. If I could not judge that my time is being wasted, I could not see myself as alienated and I could not str