Redhead's admirable book addresses the questions, What cultural, religious, and other baggage do we bring with us to our political interactions with others, and how does it affect those interactions? I am grateful both for the way in which he has opened up those questions and for his generally accurate and always generous treatment of my views. If he has in some ways misunderstood them, this is the result only of an error of omission. For he has neglected to take adequate note both of my account of the distinctive characteristics of most political interactions in the liberal democracies of advanced modernity (except, oddly and briefly, in his footnote 208) and of the importance that I attach to the Thomistic conception of common goods. Yet, without reference to these, some of my central claims about what we bring to political conversations are apt to be misunderstood.

I think of reasoning (or deliberation), arts of the self, and micropolitics as inter-involved modalities of private and public life that are not entirely reducible to one another. You reason, alone or with others, when you ask how to realize a set of goals or to modify them in new circumstances. You practice arts of the self after, say, you have acknowledged that some element in your faith promotes unnecessary suffering for others and/or is inconsonant with other prized elements. That element clings to you or you to it even though another part of you would like it go. An Augustinian might call this a will divided against itself.

Charles Taylor opens the essay “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” with the stark claim: “Foucault disconcerts.” Foucault disconcerts, on Taylor's reading, because he appears to repudiate both freedom and truth. Where other Western thinkers have sought to “[make] ordinary life the significant locus of the issues that distinguish the good life,” the Foucault of Discipline and Punish seems to refuse this Enlightenment valuation. After puzzling alongside Foucault, and the implications of his thought for freedom and truth, Taylor finally queries what drives Foucault to adopt a Nietzschean model of truth and argues to the contrary that we can trust in progressive change from one form of life to another because its politics intuitively derive from our personal discovery of “our sense of ourselves, our identity, of what we are.” These changes entail that “we have already become something. Questions of freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project.” For Taylor, the link between personal and political discovery is so tight, so intuitive, and such a clear barometer for progress and change, that the insistence on incommensurability, let alone its use to challenge Enlightenment values, simply is perverse. And so Taylor concludes his essay by asking of the late Foucault two questions: “Can we really step outside the identity developed in Western civilization to such a degree that we can repudiate all that comes to us from the Christian understanding of the will?” and “Is the resulting ‘aesthetic of existence’ all that admirable?”

I begin with an observation of Hannah Arendt's about metaphor that bears significantly, I think, upon Redhead's endeavor to come to terms with her in chapter 3, “Hannah Arendt on Reasoning without Banisters.” “The metaphor,” writes Arendt, “bridging the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on thinking and hence on philosophy, but the metaphor itself is poetic rather than philosophic in origin.”

Among contemporary scholars of American religious freedom, Andrew Koppelman and Steven Smith are two of the most esteemed. They address, in their respective books, a broad range of important issues. Space limitations constrain me to be selective in this review essay; I comment here on what Koppelman and Smith say, and don't say, about two of the most fundamental issues regarding American religious freedom: the meaning of the nonestablishment norm and the constitutionality of granting conscience-protecting exemptions only to religious believers.

Mark Redhead's first book, Charles Taylor: Living and Thinking Deep Diversity, offers an in-depth study of Taylor's political thought which insists, rightly in my view, on the close connection between that political thought on the one hand and Taylor's political context and activism in his native Quebec on the other. In this new book, it is both reassuring and instructive to witness someone with Redhead's deep and long knowledge of Taylor incorporate his more recent work, A Secular Age, into a discussion of the themes of Taylor's corpus more generally.