‘Radical Ordinary’ seemed like a good idea. The ‘ordinary’ is just, well, it is just so ordinary. No one is particularly attracted to the ‘ordinary’. But our lives are sustained by the ‘ordinary’. So maybe one of the ways to remind us of the significance of the ordinary is to qualify the ordinary by the word ‘radical’. A clever strategy that may, given Bowlin's response to the book Coles and I wrote, be far too clever.

Coles’ and my appeal to the ordinary was an attempt to call attention to the significance of the everyday. It is a gesture I have often used. Indeed one of my favourite essays is titled, ‘Taking Time for Peace: The Ethical Significance of the Trivial’.Footnote ¹ This essay was my attempt to show that knowing how to go on with the common tasks of everyday life could be a form of resistance to war. It was also an attempt to resist the insistence by some that everything we do must be orientated by the attempt to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This insistence was based on the reason that nuclear war threatened human survival, and if we did not survive then our lives would be meaningless. Of course I want to avoid war, and in particular nuclear war, but I thought the way to do that was to not let opposition to war determine everything we do.

I think there is a connection between what I was trying to argue in ‘Taking Time for Peace’ and the position I tried to develop in the book with Coles, but the word ‘radical’ seems to suggest something more is going on. In the ‘Introduction’ to Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary we say ‘by radical ordinary we gesture to the ways in which the inexhaustible complexities of everyday life forever call forth new efforts of attention, nurture, and struggle that exceed the elements of blindness that accompany even our best words and deeds’.Footnote ² ‘Radical’ is used to qualify ‘ordinary’ as a reminder that ‘appropriate attention to the ongoing struggle’ must be given if we are to form a common life to sustain our connections to one another.Footnote ³

Bowlin worries that such an account of the ‘radical’ may make the ordinary an end in itself in a manner that does not require a telos. He does not think that you can emphasise the importance of activities without also naming the ends that make intelligible the activities themselves. Moreover a stress on activity as an end in itself does not pay appropriate attention to the significance of the virtues for avoiding idolatry. ‘Just democracy, just church’, Bowlin argues, is difficult enough without being burdened with the ambition to be ‘radical’.

John even worries that by underwriting Coles’ account of radical democracy I may have transformed and even abandoned themes that have been characteristic emphases in my past work. Can I support the work of radical democracy and maintain the priority of the scriptural narrative and the corresponding character of the church as a community that is an alternative to the world? What happens to my emphasis on the significance of the virtues to sustain the work of peace in a world of war? Have I given up on the necessity of authority for the discovery of goods in common?

I certainly did not think I was abandoning or changing my mind about these emphases in my work. To use the word ‘radical’ to describe the ordinary was an attempt to imagine the ‘political’ in richer terms than those associated with state formations. In other words, by calling attention to the radical ordinary I thought we were trying to avoid, just as I had tried to avoided in prior work, letting state politics rob us of a richer conception of politics. I certainly did not mean to imply, as Bowlin suggests, that democracy and church made radical are sufficient to challenge our idolatrous desires in a manner that does not also require the ‘just love of Christ’. I was trying to avoid any such implication by calling attention to lives such as Will Campbell, Jean Vanier and Gregory of Nazianzus. Their lives are unintelligible if Jesus is not the Son of God.

But I may well have tried to make their lives do more work for the argument the book tries to develop than I should have done. I did not mean to suggest that ‘activity’ can be abstracted from such lives. Bowlin's suggestion that ‘radical’ means that the accent is put on activity rather than ends seems to ignore the significance of lives like Campbell, Vanier and Gregory. I do think – and not as a new thought ‘after Coles’ – that the church needs stories of radical democratic practices, but it is surely the case that I think radical democratic practices need stories exemplified in the lives of people like Campbell, Vanier and Gregory.

Bowlin argues, however, that by becoming an advocate of radical democratic practices I may have underwritten the Stoic emphasis on activity as an end in itself. I confess I have always assumed that if Jesus has not been raised from the dead then Stoicism is the best alternative we have. That is particularly the case in times when our lives are dominated by the politics of empire. Unable to imagine any alternative to the politics of empire Stoics do the best they can within the world they have been fated to negotiate. Stoicism is the humane ideology to sustain the functionaries of empire.

But Jesus has been raised from the dead. So we are not without hope. Hope is the virtue that Stoicism refuses. Hope is the virtue of a community that can produce people like Will Campbell, Jean Vanier and Gregory of Nazianzus. Hope is the virtue that sustains the work of SNCC and the IAF. Bowlin asks if activities such as tending, remembering, receiving, accepting, discerning, remaining vulnerable and being porous do not require ends external to themselves. I think that is the wrong way to put the matter. It is not that they require ends external to themselves, but rather they require the attention made possible through the story of hope called Jesus.

I worry that Bowlin's call for an end external to the activity can suggest that the end can be known adequately without lives like those which we make central to Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary. Influenced as I am by Aristotle's and MacIntyre's accounts of the relation of the virtues to the end, I assume that the virtues are constitutive of how the end is finally understood. For Aristotle, happiness names complete virtue in complete life, which I take to mean that we only know what it means to be happy retrospectively. In After Virtue MacIntyre develops Aristotle's point by using the grail legend to suggest that the knight comes to understand that for which they seek by undergoing the harms and dangers required by the journey.

Bowlin is quite right, I think, to suggest that I did not sufficiently develop this account of the virtues in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary. It is tempting in my defence to say that you cannot do everything in every book, but I do not think that response is adequate. I should have suggested how the virtues, and in particular, the virtue of hope, are required to sustain the kind of activity, the kind of lives, that I find so importantly exemplified in the work of L'Arche, SNCC and the IAF. Coles and I did, however, pay close attention to the virtue of patience which is the virtue that turns fate into destiny.

However, Bowlin's suggestion that the radical turn in democratic and church practice may be but an updated version of Stoicism helps me say why I do not think Rom's and my use of the qualifier ‘radical’ is just a throwaway. What is radical about a politics that has the time to wash feet is the refusal to let the ideologies and idolatry of empire determine what counts as ‘result’. Such a refusal is at once ordinary and radical, drawing as it must on convictions incomprehensible to those who have accepted the fate-determined time of empire.

Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, in her response to our book at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting in January 2008, drew on the understanding of ordinary time in the Anglican tradition to suggest what she understood to be at the heart of our book. I cannot say better what she has said:

Learning to live in ordinary time requires learning to live by a hope that makes the ordinary radical.