Do religious arguments have a public role in the post-9/11 world? Can we hold democracy together despite fractures over moral issues? Are there moral limits on the struggle against terror? Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard. Drawing inspiration from Whitman, Dewey, and Ellison, Jeffrey Stout sketches the proper role of religious discourse in a democracy. He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard. Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.

Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard.

Why do some democratic governments succeed and others fail? In a book that has received attention from policymakers and civic activists in America and around the world, Robert Putnam and his collaborators offer empirical evidence for the importance of "civic community" in developing successful institutions. Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in 1970 when Italy created new governments for each of its regions. After spending two decades analyzing the efficacy of these governments in such fields as agriculture, housing, and health services, they reveal patterns of associationism, trust, and cooperation that facilitate good governance and economic prosperity.

The first people in the world to call themselves 'liberals' were New England Christians in the early republic, for whom being liberal meant being receptive to a range of beliefs and values. The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when the first Boston liberals brought the Enlightenment into Reformation Christianity, tying equality and liberty to the human soul at the same moment these root concepts were being tied to democracy. The nineteenth century saw the development of a robust liberal intellectual culture in America, built on open-minded pursuit of truth and acceptance of human diversity. By the twentieth century, what had begun in Boston as a narrow, patrician democracy transformed into a religion of democracy in which the new liberals of modern America believed that where different viewpoints overlap, common truth is revealed. The core American principles of liberty and equality were never free from religion but full of religion.

G. K. Chesterton wrote, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." This book pays homage to major theologians of the Christian tradition that tell the history of theology. Matt Jenson engages in charitable yet critical exposition and dialogue with eleven select thinkers, offering a lucid, synthetic account of their theology with a view to ongoing systematic theological issues. He engages directly with core primary texts and treats individual theologians in greater depth and nuance than most overview textbooks.

The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.

Kyoto is both a popular destination for tourists and home to one and a half million inhabitants. There is lively debate about how best to develop the city, involving a variety of stakeholders, forming a particlar social arena that has no match elsewhere in Japan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book analyses the social tensions and conflicts about the built environment and the public cultural heritage in Kyoto.