Dialogic Courage and Tenacious Hope

For secular and religious communicators alike, the interplay of faith and reason has been an ongoing topic of deliberation. Interest in these themes continues in Jordi Pujol’s The Collapse of Freedom of Expression: Reconstructing the Ancient Roots of Modern Liberty in the context of a crisis of listening and a chaos of speech in the public sphere. Pujol’s project explores the meaning of free speech and freedom of expression to identify the boundaries and limits of these terms and to understand how we might navigate the extremes that arise. In particular, the book analyzes external and internal threats to freedom of expression: censorship and ideological imposition, respectively. The latter is relevant to Chapter 19, “Repairing the Relationship between the Secular and the Sacred,” which focuses on the role of religion in contemporary problems of free speech. Pujol acknowledges that many controversial issues involve religious voices today, with implications on our understanding of faith and reason. After reviewing Pujol’s call to reintegrate faith and reason, this essay points to dialogic courage and tenacious hope as communicative virtues that can aid in fruitful friendship between the secular and sacred in the public sphere

Courage · Dialogic · Epistemology · Pedagogy · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Optimism, Hope, and Well-being · Philosophy · Psychology · Resilience and Mental Health · Theological Perspectives and Practices