In the spirit of Peter Berger's belief that somewhere between fundamentalism and relativism there is a middle ground of humbled and still principled religious discourse, I think Austin Dacey offers important insights to social and religous conservatives despite the disagreements that exist between those that go by the latter description and secular liberals, like Mr. Dacey.
Richard John Neuhaus gives another excellent review of Austin Dacey's work in his comments of March 7th, in On the Square:
quote:
Do not be put off because it is published by Prometheus Press, the source of a seemingly endless flood of secular humanist and anti-religious propaganda. Nor by the fact that the book is endorsed by the notorious Peter Singer, Princeton’s contribution to helping us make our peace with infanticide and other enormities, and also by Sam Harris, the slash and burn author of The End of Faith.
Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, published this month, is a welcome contribution to the way we think and argue about the right ordering—which inescapably means the moral ordering— of the society of which we are all part. He notes that, when I published The Naked Public Square more than twenty years ago, liberal secularists had to a very large extent excluded from public discourse explicitly moral arguments—and especially arguments associated with a recognizable religious tradition. Now secularists are alarmed and appalled by the inundation of moral and religious language in the public square, but they have learned nothing. They are still, against their own interests, pursuing the same policy of exclusion.
