The truth is that migrants are, as a population, exceptional people. And it is the qualities of migrants – not just their education and skills – that benefit our economy and society. Those people who elect to move abroad are, by nature or by choice, often willing to tolerate more risk and ambiguity in their pursuit of opportunity. In their Canadian workplaces, they are “divergent thinkers” whose different ways of viewing the world can challenge the status quo and stimulate new approaches to problems. Migrants often bring cross-cultural skills and international networks, assets to Canada’s economy in an age of global integration.

The rest of the piece is here.

In its own way, market reasoning ... empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.

This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.

I find it hard to disagree with Sandel's critique, and I am curious to know how we foster a public discourse distinguished by "moral and spiritual argument." Sandel doesn't say so directly, but the implication of his argument that religious voices ought to be expressed more clearly and reasonably on issues social concern.

I don't know if it is fair to lay the blame for the impoverishment of our public discourse at the feet of economists (as he does), when the contribution of religious thinking to the issues of our times has been so limited and narrow. True moral deliberation is different from simple 'advocacy' or the promotion of moral panic (a favoured tactic of too many religious leaders). Instead, I think such deliberation calls for the articulation of views (religious or not) in a language that bridges perspectives, fosters shared understanding and builds common cause. It means adopting a mode of public discourse that reflects and speaks to our nobility, and that trusts in the capacity of people to grasp the import of spiritual principles and the implications of profound concepts.

We can't take for granted, as some appear to think, that religion naturally belongs in the public sphere. There are good historical reasons that our secular condition has emerged, and they relate directly to the domination of the public sphere by one or few religious voices to the exclusion of others. Religious participation in the public sphere must be earned through the hard work of proven relevance -- which may, in the end, help us to define, together, Sandel's moral limits on markets.

The 2011 PROSE Awards received 512 entries – more than ever before in its 36-year history – from more than 60 professional and scholarly publishers across the US. The PROSE Awards, organised by The Association of American Publishers, annually recognize the best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals and electronic content in over 40 categories. They are judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals and recognise pioneering works of research contributing to the conception, production and design of landmark works in their fields.

A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people’s actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities—including self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one’s community, commitment to one’s spouse and children—derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lines in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity’s failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics, and so forth. More abstractly but important in different ways, the ideological secularism of the public sphere and the naturalist metaphysical assumptions of academic life, combined with the state of philosophy and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences, prevent the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights. Secularization and scientism are thus subverting modernity’s most fundamental assumptions from within, developments that are facilitated by the same institutional arrangements of liberalism that solved early modern Europe’s problem of religious coexistence.

I once attended a lecture about 'the new atheism,' in which the speaker likened growing up in a modern western society to the experience of waking up in a room in which the gas supplying heat has just been exhausted. The room is still warm, and the visitor could be forgiven for thinking that this was its natural condition. But inevitably the heat dissipates and room again becomes cold. The gas must be refilled. The analogy, of course, was about the role of religion in society: that it is the invisible source of the values underlying our social institutions. What happens when it's gone? I think that's a really interesting question to ask, and I'm not sure what the answer is.

I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. It takes courage to hope; it doesn't take courage to despair. Freud said that religious faith is the illusion — the comforting illusion — that there is a father figure. But a religious believer could say to Freud that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure and you can get away with whatever you feel like doing. So I don't know why atheism is somehow considered more heroic than theism; I call that an adolescent dream.

And then he proceeds to give a poignant defense of religion as something more than right living:

I once defined faith as the redemption of solitude. It sanctifies relationships, builds communities, and turns our gaze outward from self to other, giving emotional resonance to altruism and energising the better angels of our nature. These are some of the gifts of our encounter with transcendence, and whether it is love of humanity that leads to the love of God or the other way round, it remains the necessary gravitational force that keeps us, each, from spinning off into independent orbits, binding us instead into the myriad forms of collective beatitude. A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long.

The enduring value of religion is not that it helps us to live better lives as individuals. (There have been plenty of virtuous non-believers). It is that it helps us to live better lives together.

Again suppose, that several distinct societies maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions. History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue.

And Sen carries on comment:

The underlying approach to justice here contrasts with the influential view of Hobbes, according to which there has to be a sovereign state for us to entertain any coherent idea of justice. Hobbes was moved by the idea that institutional demands of justice can be met only within the limits of a functioning sovereign state, which is needed to establish and support the required institutions. While Hume was deeply concerned about the importance of institutions, on which he made many penetrating observations, he was reluctant to allow the idea of justice to be narrowed by the boundaries of sovereignty, as if there were no issues of global justice that could take us beyond our national borders.

One has the sense that the world is retreating from the impulse to global justice, so strong after World War II and again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The perceived failure of high minded initiatives and the renewed assertion of sovereignty associated with the rise of the emerging powers (China, India, Brazil, and co) highlights how far we have to travel from the well instituationalized nation-state to effective global governance. And yet, we remain irreversibly conscious of the oneness of humanity, by virtue of our personal experience and the reach of media and commerce, and we still cannot ignore its implications for global justice. Hume saw this dawning consciousness some 250 years ago.

Religious freedom is not only a basic right, it is a human value that requires consultation and practical action to bring into reality. Some of the issues that arise in conversations regarding religious freedom are not easy to resolve – typically, issues related to the public manifestation of belief through teaching, practice, or worship. The freedom to hold or change one’s belief, for example, relates directly to the freedom to share these beliefs with others. However, some states criminalize the teaching of religions in the name of protecting "morality" or "maintaining public order." While extreme measures such as incitement to hatred and violence should be condemned, people need to otherwise remain free to be exposed to new ideas and to share information.

In the meantime, I still give away my opinions way too freely -- just give me a call and let's go out for coffee.

I've arrived at the conclusion these past few years that the kind of fantastic income and wealth inequalities in this country (and the trends that keep reinforcing them) are a threat to our political and social order. The massive concentration of wealth at the top is undermining some core assumptions about common citizenship, even within a free market economy, especially since much of the wealth seems acquired by accounting chicanery, crony capitalism and a K-Street fix. As such, conservatives should be worrying about inequality as much as liberals. So far, this is largely a peaceful, groovy, inchoate protest against the right target: the concentration of wealth in the financial sector and its immunity from any kind of social or political accountability for its role in the unending recession in people's incomes.

The present political discourse in the US does not seem to accommodate a discussion of eliminating the extremes of wealth and poverty. This seems to be related, at least in part, to declining faith in the capacity or credibiliy of the state to tax fairly and then to administer successful social programs that bring the worst off out of poverty. I share some skepticism of the 'state is the solution' brand of thinking. So if these protests do anything, I hope that the message gets into the mainstream and helps to re-invigorate a sense of moral responsibility (and social expectation) among the wealthy to give philanthopically to causes that target poverty.

I am not sure what Habermas’ personal beliefs are. But I don’t think that his change of mind about religion has anything to do with some sort of personal conversion. Rather, as has been the case with most sociologists of religion, Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter. Beyond this acknowledgement of the empirical reality of the contemporary world, Habermas admits the historical roots in Biblical religion of modern individualism, and he thinks that this connection is still operative today. Yet, when all is said and done, Habermas now has a positive view of religion (at least in its Judaeo-Christian version) for utilitarian reasons: Religion, whether true or not, is socially useful.

In addition to finding this discussion interesting, it is also worth noting the background of the author. Berger went through a similar transformation in his work to Habermas -- advocating the 'secularization thesis' (that all societies become more secular as they move from a traditional economy to a modern one) early on, before reversing course later in his career. Also interesting to note is that he did his PhD thesis on the Baha'i religion (discussed by Peter Smith here).

I find Berger's point persuasive and worth pondering because I think there is a tendency for even thoughtful religious people to seek out public validation for their beliefs on the basis of social utility (eg. religion promotes community, builds social capital, cultivates character). This may be true, but it is not why religion matters in the world. Surely, religion matters because its basis (revelation) constitutes a body of knowledge that deepens our understanding of reality in ways that matter.  There is a concordance with reality as we experience it that validates the beliefs underpinning religion.

I think the real virtue of faith is not that it is an extraordinary premise, but that it is an extraordinary conclusion. In other words, faith is the realization one achieves after witnessing how revelation unravels mysteries in one's life purpose, conscience and relationships. 

At least that's how it looks from here.