Archive...

"Anthony Cook characterizes liberalism as 'a different kind of religion, with its own presuppositions of faith' that conceives of the autonomous rational individual as its own god, pursuing her own perception of good ratherthan a presupposed common good reflecting the will of a transcendent God.

He argues that:

Deconstruction demystifies the liberal faith. . . .exposing its vulnerability to the same critique it makes of more traditional forms of religious faith. The sacred scripture, the Constitution, is indeterminate. The spiritual intermediaries, judges, are tainted by personal bias, and the body of religious literature, constitutional decisions, protects the status quo. . . .

Deconstruction permits us to see liberalism as but another way of understanding the world. . . . The hope is that by deflating liberalism of its pretensions of superiority to religious discourse, the playing field is leveled and the way prepared for a more genuine dialogue between these competing attempts to discern life's purpose and to imbue our lives with meaning.

The structural bias that liberalism has erected to the use of religious knowledge in public and legal discourse does not alter the fact that theological norms are even more useful and fundamental to our understanding of desegregation theory and racial justice in general, than the thoroughly deconstructed and indeterminate norms of liberalism."
(The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice
Spring, 1992, 315
Transformative Desegregation: Liberating
Hearts and Minds
By Wendy Brown Scott)