Abstract

Life can only be understood as an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment allow. For the pragmatist, the world’s saviors are immanent, multiple, and ordinary. “Man finds himself living in an aleatory world,” writes John Dewey, “his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable.”3 This fundamental ambiguity is compounded by the distinct conditions of our late modern, globalizing, postsecular world. Amidst the conditions of this world, the religious meanings, purposes, and desires that have traditionally oriented human life are being relativized; the boundaries of our religious and moral traditions ..