Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies

Extract

Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies. By Fred M. Frohock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 272p. $69.95.

While authors such as Michael Perry challenge liberal thinkers such as Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls to move beyond their neutral rendering of political discourse in order to foster an ecumenical politics between secular and spiritual perspectives, Fred Frohock contends that the public discourse of liberal theory cannot grasp the supernatural basis of sacred discourses. Instead, Frohock contends that “thin” realism (p. 159), found in international relations theory, can better negotiate the tensions between secular and religious discourses in pluralist democracies: “[R]elationships between secular and the sacred, religion and politics, church and state, are settled by the great political languages of stability, efficiency, equity, and power (among other collective level terms), not the metaphors of walls and spheres” (p. 197).