It's a next step in the radical disestablishment of religion in this country.

The exclusivity of materialist/medicalized understandings of the entire range of human capabilities and experience, as well as ecclesiastical capacity to insist on orthodoxy and particularity, are both fast eroding

We have so much religious diversity, and we don't have the history of an established church that can provide a location and an umbrella under which to reinvent ourselves as a multireligious society, as progressive reformers in Britain are trying to do. On the one hand, I want to remind religious folks of that. On the other, I want to say to the secularists that, look, you have lost the game. You didn't provide a language and an understanding of the human person that's adequate. So, to a certain extent, these religious reformers are right. Personal transformation, particularly in Americans' eyes, is understood as something that is spiritual or religious. It's about more than fixing people in an engineering sense. I think that secularists are going to have to make bridges toward these spiritual communities and languages. People get better when they're treated as whole human beings, and religion is one way in which that wholeness is imagined, culturally.

We have so much religious diversity, and we don't have the history of an established church that can provide a location and an umbrella under which to reinvent ourselves as a multireligious society, as progressive reformers in Britain are trying to do. On the one hand, I want to remind religious folks of that. On the other, I want to say to the secularists that, look, you have lost the game. You didn't provide a language and an understanding of the human person that's adequate. So, to a certain extent, these religious reformers are right. Personal transformation, particularly in Americans' eyes, is understood as something that is spiritual or religious. It's about more than fixing people in an engineering sense. I think that secularists are going to have to make bridges toward these spiritual communities and languages. People get better when they're treated as whole human beings, and religion is one way in which that wholeness is imagined, culturally.

We have so much religious diversity, and we don't have the history of an established church that can provide a location and an umbrella under which to reinvent ourselves as a multireligious society, as progressive reformers in Britain are trying to do. On the one hand, I want to remind religious folks of that. On the other, I want to say to the secularists that, look, you have lost the game. You didn't provide a language and an understanding of the human person that's adequate. So, to a certain extent, these religious reformers are right. Personal transformation, particularly in Americans' eyes, is understood as something that is spiritual or religious. It's about more than fixing people in an engineering sense. I think that secularists are going to have to make bridges toward these spiritual communities and languages. People get better when they're treated as whole human beings, and religion is one way in which that wholeness is imagined, culturally.

We have so much religious diversity, and we don't have the history of an established church that can provide a location and an umbrella under which to reinvent ourselves as a multireligious society, as progressive reformers in Britain are trying to do. On the one hand, I want to remind religious folks of that. On the other, I want to say to the secularists that, look, you have lost the game. You didn't provide a language and an understanding of the human person that's adequate. So, to a certain extent, these religious reformers are right. Personal transformation, particularly in Americans' eyes, is understood as something that is spiritual or religious. It's about more than fixing people in an engineering sense. I think that secularists are going to have to make bridges toward these spiritual communities and languages. People get better when they're treated as whole human beings, and religion is one way in which that wholeness is imagined, culturally.