to politics, I elaborate and defend an approach that incorporates,
develops, and systematizes much of what I only sketchily sug-
gested in those concluding passages to Morality, Politics, and
Law.

This is the main question: What is the proper role, if any, of
religious-moral discourse in the politics of a religiously and mor-
ally pluralistic society like the United States? If religious-moral
discourse should not be excluded from "the public square", how
should it be included: In particular, how should such discourse
be brought to bear in the practice of political justification? The
serious challenge, in my view, is to define a middle ground be-
tween, on the one side, the position of Kent Greenawalt and
others (whose work I discuss in chapter 1) who would largely
exclude religious-moral discourse from political-justificatory prac-
tice and, on the other side, the position of those who would
bring religious-moral discourse to bear in a sectarian, divisive
way. Must we conclude that there is, alas, no stable "middle
ground"?

Love and Power is, in part, an effort to grapple with what has
aptly been called "no small political problem": On the eve of a
significant moment in American political history, the election of
the first Catholic, John F. Kennedy, to the White House, the
American Jesuit John Courtney Murray wrote:

Pluralism . . . implies disagreement and dissension within the com-
munity. But it also implies a community within which there must be
agreement and consensus. There is no small political problem here.
If society is to be at all a rational process, some set of principles
must motivate the participation of all religious groups, despite their
dissensions, in the oneness of the community. On the other hand,
these common principles must not hinder the maintenance by each
group of its own different identity. The problem of pluralism is, of
course, practical; as a project, its "working out" is an exercise in
civic virtue. But the problem is also theoretical; its solution is an
exercise in political intelligence that will lay down, as the basis for
the "working out," some sort of doctrine. ⁵

In Love and Power I "lay down" several principles "as a basis for
the 'working out'"--principles to guide religious participation in
the politics of a religiously/morally pluralistic society like our own. ⁶

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