Sublime

To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who

our

we are heading closer to the world Bellah predicted would arise “if the whole God symbolism requires reformulation.”24 He argued, “There will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification.”

Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in.

submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.⁠6 Wallace’s p

Weber believed that it was only in the West that knowledge came to have “universal significance and validity.” The overarching theme of Weber’s historical sociology was to trace the long history of the rationalizing process which culminated in modern Western civilization.