Sublime

my strategy is “Schaefferian” in the sense that my primary audience is not just philosophers but practitioners—more specifically, Christians engaged in ministry in a postmodern world, as well as searching inhabitants of this postmodern world. As such, these essays are not an academic project per se.

Is there something about people who live on a frontier that renders them incapable of the decisive either/or and disposes them towards the indefinite both/and?

postliberalism views human beings as relational and freedom as a balance between autonomy and self-restraint.

Indeed, I will argue that liberty in the broad sense requires judges and officials, when applying legal principles, to assert norms of reasonableness. Otherwise, self-interested people will use law to claim almost anything.

Both threats strike at the heart of democracy, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted in Democracy in America, depends on deep and diverse, non-market, decentralized social and civil connections to thrive

Common to these very diverse traditions is the idea that politics is not a utilitarian science of maximizing the happiness of the greatest number but rather a practice of ethical judgement for the flourishing of all persons as they are in their families, localities and workplaces.

The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection.