ABSTRACT
If religion is playing new roles in modern, globalizing societies, operating in dispersed form as discourse cut loose from traditional sources of authority, what implications does this have for traditions of political philosophy based on a model of church-state relations derived from early modern Europe? The vision outlined by John Rawls in the first quotation specifies political liberalism in the form of a quest – a never-ending quest to find the social and political arrangements that will best support and help to create the kind of society Rawls describes. This vision grew from the religious strife of early modern Europe, but in contexts where descent from European societies is not claimed, or is in some way problematic, it may have very different cultural resonances.
