A Present Prospect for American Religious Thought

Abstract

There are students of religious thought (and there are instructors) who speak confidently about methods but are puzzled when asked what these methods should lead people publicly to conclude or publicly to do. Accepted are new forms of discourse; neglected are the public implications of discourse-the new truths, values, and moral practices. If relativism, pluralism, pragmatism, and historicism are to be accepted in humanistic studies, it is not that this by itself is important, but that this suggests how the world has changed and how practices should change. Nevertheless, it is common for both disinterested religious studies students and interested theological students to neglect the public implications of their religious study. The consequence is that religious studies does not train its students to become good public intellectuals. American students' inattention to large intellectual outcomes and moral actions can be traced to several causes. It can be attributed to the desacralization of the nation (what Robert Bellah calls the broken covenant), which undermines the confidence in the nation that typically has inspired intellectuals' public involvement. It can be attributed to the sacralization of careers (what many call the professionalization of academia), which undermines intellectuals' interest in the publicreally, undermines their interest in virtually anything beyond their profession itself. Finally, it can be attributed to new difficulties in naming our cultural place; it is to this problem that I turn.