This is my last post on the pope’s speech. The controversy that surrounds it just needs to die down, and certainly he’s said everything he reasonably could to contribute to that goal. The final word should go to the distinguished medieval historian Thomas F. Madden. Madden writes that "the lecture...is, in fact, not about Islam at all. Benedict is calling a crusade, but it is one against a Christianity stripped of reason and a science stripped of transcendent truths. ’In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, an inquiry into the rationality of faith.’"
Thank you, Peter, for providing all these links. I’m going to put the Pope’s lecture alongside John Winthrop, Roger Williams, George Mason, and James Madison in my course - to help signal that it is not a history of ideas course.
In the interests of discussion, I should be less cryptic. The big question is whether the path to toleration requires a kind of "privatization" - making faith into an "opinion": the secular path, to which Madison (or "Madison") eventually led. Or whether there is another that the Pope (rightly understood) points to.