Sublime

The point of leading a free life—both individually and collectively—is not to transcend the realm of necessity but to be able to negotiate its relation to the realm of freedom.

the bond between love and grief is what I am asking us to see.

The dynamic of secular faith thus accounts for the possibility of ongoing commitments—whether to individual aspirations, love relations, or collective endeavors. These are secular forms of faith because they are devoted to projects that are bound by time.

Rather, the task of our democratic society is to be organized in such a way that we are intrinsically motivated to participate in, contribute to, and transform its ongoing life, by virtue of having been educated to exercise our spiritual freedom.

This Life addresses both religious and secular audiences. I invite the religious (and the religiously inclined) to ask themselves if they actually have faith in eternity and if this faith is compatible with the care that animates their lives. Furthermore, I encourage both religious and secular readers to see why the finitude of our lives should not

Caring about someone or something requires that we believe in its value, but it also requires that we believe that what is valued can cease to be.

To own our lives is to acknowledge this essential finitude, as both the chance of being together and the risk of breaking apart.

The key to the critique of capitalism is therefore the revaluation of value. The foundation of capitalism is the measure of wealth in terms of socially necessary labor time. In contrast, the overcoming of capitalism requires that we measure our wealth in terms of what I call socially available free time. As long as our measure of wealth is socially