believers and as citizens. For such people, liberal secularist models of pubic reasoning
are at best an unfair and at worst a stifling genre of political theorizing.
have to be a committed theist to see the merit of Wolterstorff’s challenge, nor does one
need to peer far outside academia to see that many “reasonable” theistic voices have not
only articulated a similar criticism but are also advancing politics that are at odds with
liberal secularism.
The question then that this paper focuses on is what might be viable alternative
secularist form of public reason? One that dovetails considerably with liberal secularism
and its values of autonomy, equality and toleration, but at the same time is open to the
concerns of theistic voices like Wolterstorf’s? This paper pursues this task first through
engaging some strands of the corpus of an explicitly Thomistic public reasoner, Alasdair
Macintyre, and then working in light of his concerns with secularism engaging two
theorists crafting alternative secularisms, Charles Taylor and William Connolly.
Macintyre has spent a considerable portion of life polemicizing against and then
generating a model of practical reason or tradition constituted inquiry through which to
generate arguments in favor of his own brand of neo-Thomist public reason. Liberals and
others have rightly resisted the latter. Yet what often gets overlooked in the critical reply
to Macintrye is the salience of some of his criticisms of liberal secularism and hence the
need for engagement with them. Hence, I engage Macintyre not because his Thomistic
model provides a powerful alternative to liberal secularism but because a number of his
criticisms and concerns about liberal secularism are ones that secularists need to at least
engage both because of the lived quandary they testify to in the lives of many fellow
citizens and conversely because they illuminate as well the limits to engagement of a
secularism that has moved more than a little outside of liberalism.
2
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Why we should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us” in Paul J. Weithman ed.
Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1997) p. 177.
2
Convention