WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYfaiths; and, fourth, offers the best opportunity for diverse faiths to co-exist without vio-
lence while supporting the civic conditions of common governance. It does not issue in a
simple universalism, in which one image of transcendence prevails everywhere or in cul-
tural relativism, in which one faith prevails here and another there. It is neither universal-
ism nor relativism in the simple mode of each.^31 It is pluralism. A pluralism that
periodically must be defended militantly against this or that drive to religio-state
unitarianism.
The public ethos of pluralism pursued here, again, solicits the active cultivation of
pluralist virtues by each faith and the negotiation of a positive ethos of engagement be-
tween faiths. Unlike the versions of liberalism and relativism Strauss and Bennett oppose,
I am thereby a proponent of civic virtue. But the public virtues embraced are pluralist
virtues. The civic virtues of pluralism, in turn, must become embedded in numerous
institutional practices for a positive ethos of pluralism to be.
Such modulating practices are already operative, to some degree, in many, perhaps
most, faith-practices. They are also more densely sedimented in nontheistic practices than
many theological and secular intellectualists admit.^32 They find expression in the multi-
media worlds of family ritual, neighborhood gossip, classroom routine, dormitory living,
urban apartments, occupational disciplines, professional practices, individual exercises,
films, and TV dramas. Such cultural practices mix image, word, rhythm, music, and other
nonconceptual sounds to help compose the relational, thought-imbued moods that in-
habit us.
The ennobling of pluralism, to the extent it occurs, moves back and forth between
microscopic negotiation of mundane issues among multiple minorities, reflexive work
upon the relational dimension of their own faith-practices by specific constituencies, and
public engagement with larger issues of the day. It is the endless circuits back and forth
that do the most productive work.
The motives to support multidimensional pluralism are themselves diverse, irreduc-
ible to any single model of moral obligation or self-interest. Support is grounded partly
in care for the late-modern condition that multiplies minorities on the same territory;
partly in a desire to ensure that you do not become a minority persecuted by others;
partly in an interest to protect the survival of democracy under the distinctive conditions
of late-modern life; partly in recognition of the embedded character of your own faith as
well as that of others; partly in specific injunctions to love, generosity, charity, or hospital-
ity that help to compose your own faith-practices; partly in a desire to avoid participation
in otherwise unnecessary modes of violence fomented by the clarion call of national unity;
and partly in a mixture of these motives, which will vary in texture from case to case. The
hope is that these motives will mix into one another, engendering a positive resonance
machine.
Tolerance of negotiation, mutual adjustment, relational modesty, and agonistic re-
spect are, up to a point, cardinal virtues of embedded pluralism. The limit is reached when
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