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own skepticism about the ability to provide the ground that civilization needs’’ (p. 282).
Ultimately, Strauss might be right, Connolly surmises, in claiming that—as in the conflict
between the heterodoxy of a Spinoza and the orthodoxy of revealed religion—the differ-
ence is not of a cognitive but of a moral nature. Connolly agrees, therefore, with Strauss’s
postulation of a ‘‘ubiquity of faith,’’ but he conceives of this faith—and, one might add,
of its spatial or public distribution—as being open in principle and hence contestable.
Indeed, he adds, ‘‘it is the relational sensibility attached to faith that needs work, not the
admission that faith plays an important role in life,’’ in other words, the insight that ‘‘faith
commitments vary in intensity, content, and imperiousness’’ (pp. 285–86).
Here, in nourishing pluralist sensibility, more than in any formal or procedural deci-
sion concerning reason and revelation, immanence or transcendence—whose ontological
distinction and existential weight (for different religious and secular ‘‘faiths’’) nonetheless
remain a matter of fact and of principle—would reside the chances for democracy’s re-
newal (or, more pessimistically, its very survival). So would a certain acknowledgment
that secular republicanism and political liberalism, although indebted to Western Enlight-
enment, remain shot through with embedded and embodied practices as well as modes
of ritual enactment that are often ignored by defenders of the neutrality of its public
sphere (whether theorists of rational choice, deliberative consensus, legal proceduralism,
etc.). These tend to ‘‘pretend to identifya forum above faith through which to regulate
diverse faiths,’’ forgetting that this gesture is a theologico-political move in its own right.
The pluralist response to such curtailment is that of an ‘‘ethics of engagement,’’ resulting
in ‘‘a healthy politics of creedal ventilation within and between faiths’’ (pp. 292–93). The
principal possibility of such exchange and negotiation draws on resources in each tradi-
tion, not least on the fact that all faiths—whether in transcendence (as in the religions of
the Book) or in immanence (as in Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, and the many paganisms
and atheisms throughout history)—find a ‘‘disruptive moment,’’ which is also a moment
of ‘‘mystery,’’ within themselves (p. 295). The prospects for its practical and political
realization, however, depend upon the cultivation of sensibilities and civic virtues as well
as institutional practices, whose fragile nature implies that ‘‘pluralism emerges as a possi-
bility to pursue rather than as the certain effect of determinate conditions’’ (p. 295).
At this point, a further question imposes itself: What, if anything, would be the princi-
ple of interruption within the perspective of openness, that is to say, within deep pluralism
itself? Wouldn’t an internal rupture of any philosophy of (or faith in) immanence—and
hence also of any immanence of abundance, creativity, and so on—need to be accounted
for as well? And could such an interruption be produced immanently, in turn? What
could that interruption be but, once again, a moment of lack, passivity, or heteronomy—
call it transcendence, in short—everything that philosophies of immanence, with their
presumed lack of lack, argue against? Can reference to ‘‘time,’’ albeit a ‘‘time out of joint,’’
fulfill that function? Should one not also invoke an irreducible moment of ‘‘no-time,’’
that is to say, a foil against which creation and novelty become perceptible, if not, strictly

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