Joseph Bottum writes, in the current edition of The Weekly Standard, of liberalism in the sense I have been advocating the word should be used:
"The Naked Public Square was one of the seminal books for the modern conservative movement. But it was also a deeply liberal book--at least as liberalism used to be understood. Expounding a tradition of liberal political thought about religion that runs from George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, through Tocqueville's observations of the young republic, and down to Reinhold Niebuhr's political theology, Neuhaus understood how the attempt to strip the public square derives, at last, from a disdain for the richness of life--a distaste for the democracy of difference, the clash and mingle of real human beings."
Read the full article here.
3 comments:
For the same reason you would place any other display on any public space: to communicate.—STK
But even the older, saner Liberalism was simply unwilling to follow its own logic. It made more exceptions, but they were unprincipled exceptions.
I think it best if you just think about what it might be intended to communicate. See if you can figure it out.—STK
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