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situations where one must stress more particular identities, say, in the midst of theological debate with fellow Christians or among members of one’s political group. Even in those cases, something shared is the condition for cooperation and persuasion and thus should limit coercive interaction.
with others, the task is to find the relevant for cooperation and the limit on coercive interaction. This procedural rule requires that no specific identity be deified, having finality, as the singular Notice something key about our argument. At each point of encounter commonality that is the condition
description of one’s existence because one’s life can and ought to be dedi-cated towards right relations with and for others. This is true of the religious community as well. The Church, for instance, is not only the gathered body of believers or the body of Christ (as Christians believe), but also a human
community, a treasure in traditions that shape identities are enlisted in the project of fashioning social life dedicated to what respects and enhances the integrity of life with and for others. Anyone who can grasp the intelligibility of the rule thereby endorses, earthen vessels.^17 The various beliefs, values, and
at least implicitly, a coordinate stance in life. And the argument applies to persons and to communities insofar as the idea of identity is analogically applied to individuals and communities.This strategy for orienting social life is deeply embedded in theological 18
humanism insofar as it signals the complexity of a life: one is a religious person (of some sort) and a humanist (of some sort) and has other identities, too. Yet the possibility of that outlook is found at the crossing point of the goods that constitute the integrity of life. And this is why theological
humanism extends the finality of the “you” beyond the human other, so dear to neohumanists, to the community of life. Human beings are bound together in their mortality, their fleshliness, with other creatures, but also because we are social beings and persons who desire meaning in our lives,
reflective goods. more particular religious, ethnic, gendered, cultural, and racial identities deeply and yet with a light touch, as it were. While shaped by these identities one is not, finally, a slave to them.In other words, a theological humanist inhabits her or his
The right and responsibility of people to make decisions of priority about their identities denotes another aspect of theological humanism. It is a distinc-Freedom and Conscience
tive form of political thought explored above. Communitarians and Christian particularists freedom. This was a point that divided the two major outlooks in