Introduction: Where Angels Fear

Secular reason by itself has not been able to mitigate human suffering, and the secular discourse remains insufficient to express the full range of human experience and convictions. Coming out of Latin Christendom, secularism may be historically associated with a theological split between Being and Action, a caesura that left as its legacy a permanent fracture between ontology and praxis. Secular moral discourse, that is, an attempt to draw ethical norms from rationality alone, looks thin and circular in argument, and is often ultimately dependent on categories that are beyond secular reason itself. For instance, the problem of social violence cannot be fully addressed within a secular framework alone, the reason why M. K. Gandhi had refused to separate politics from religious ethics.