Man finds himself living in an aleatory world,” writes John Dewey, “his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable.”3 This fundamental ambiguity is compounded by the distinct conditions of our late modern, globalizing, postsecular world. Amidst the conditions of this world, the religious meanings, purposes, and desires that have traditionally oriented human life are being relativized; the boundaries of our religious and moral traditions, as a result of their passage through modernity and as an effect of their increasing cultural interconnectedness, have become more permeable to one another. Adding to these changes, some of our most conventional markers of identity, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, are being deconstructed and reconstructed. We experience the world as simultaneously shrinking and expanding—our virtual and actual contacts with far-off places and peoples are more frequent, simultaneously deepening, and, oddly, familiarizing the feel of otherness. As a result of these dynamics, we tend to be much more aware of difference at the same moment that identity is being relativized and the traditions through which we negotiate difference and identity are being destabilized. Ours is an uncannily ambiguous world. The greatest evidence of the disorienting nature of these experiences is the saturation of our public discourse with pronouncements of certainty and the “