As
Americans in a pluralistic society, however, we must create a milieu for moral decision - making that is somewhere between value conferred by intention or relation alone, and the abstract mystical fetishism that deifies the substance of human life in and of itself.
There are, as one would expect, several essays
in the book on Jews and Judaism, some reflecting Kristol's religious interests» the need, for example, to sustain
in Jewish identity a religious element and not merely a cultural one» others his political ones, exploring the relations of modern
American Jews with a
pluralistic American society that has given them an uncommonly large, though not unlimited, berth.
The challenge for our diverse,
pluralistic and democratic
society — a challenge that, as ever, falls most heavily on schools, the civic institutions with the broadest reach
in American life — is to blunt the sense that we are,
in fact, coming apart.