Here Kristen Deede Johnson uses a classic rhetorical strategy: a contrast between two rejected options, and a constructive proposal that goes between them. The contrast here is between liberal theories of tolerance and agonistic theories of difference; the proposal advances a vision of Augustinian harmony in order to move beyond the rejects. As one might expect, John Rawls and Richard Rorty exemplify the liberals, and Chantal Mouffe and William E. Connolly exemplify the agonists. In Johnson's account, Rawls's emaciated metaphysics cannot sustain human desire for the good, and William E. Connolly's ontology of violence cannot sustain hope for peace. In the intermediate stage, therefore, Johnson must develop a supplementary vision of political harmony among persons oriented to the good. This vision is ascribed to St. Augustine of Hippo, with hermeneutical assistance from John Milbank, Charles T. Mathewes, and Oliver O'Donovan. Finally, after installing this vision as the metaphysical supplement for contemporary theory, Johnson puts forward her constructive proposal. The outcome: “a picture in which differences come together in rich conversation in a pluralist society.” Who could object?

There is something right about the project and something frustrating. Imagination is crucial in political theory as in theology. You get a very different set of theoretical concerns depending on how you imagine the basics: If you imagine that all politics are reducible to friend/foe relations, as Chantal Mouffe insists, then you will see the politics of constitutional democracies as proper sites for sublimation of enmity. But if you imagine politics as more mimetic, even erotically charged, relations among rivals, as Bill Connolly does, you may look for volatile but still promising ethics of reciprocity. Our political theories have templates underneath them, or theologies, as Carl Schmitt and John Milbank, quite differently, have shown. So the work Johnson does is necessary insofar as it avows that words speak louder than words.

Johnson's selection of her protagonists is appropriate; all her interlocutors are capaciously intelligent and merit the sustained exposition that she gives them. This book could be readily given to undergraduates or beginning graduate students just for Johnson's exposition alone. And I do not damn with faint praise in saying that: It is very difficult to compose exposition that is as unfailingly gracious as one finds here. But there is also very little in Johnson's readings that will surprise or renew anyone who knows these texts well. So there are lots of missed opportunities. For example, Johnson accepts Chantal Mouffe's histrionic criticism of Rawls — followed by her lavish rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt — without comment. Or, for another, Johnson praises William E. Connolly for being more inclusive than either Rawls or Rorty, but then wonders if Connolly can discriminate among welcome or harmful differences. That rather misses the point of Connolly's obsessive effort to expose degradation as the root of many differences in our pluralist democracies.

Later, Johnson's account of St. Augustine draws nimbly on various texts, as well as contemporary interpreters who have already pioneered this terrain, especially Robert Dodaro, Charles T. Mathewes, and John Milbank. Johnson's supple intelligence makes it look easy — deft selection and sorting and lucid presentation of ideas. Yet, again, there is nothing disarming in the result: Johnson finds a St. Augustine we already knew, even if it's not a St. Augustine that's so easy to find — a St. Augustine who is realistic about domination but able to support a regime in which Christian rulers subordinate power to justice. But, of course, the question of justice is precisely at stake in imagining the relation of power/difference in the first place.

There is a lot of slippage in the constructive sections of Johnson's book among “public,” “political,” and “politics.” The stakes would be higher — and less easy to appease with “rich conversation” — if she more often used words like “law,” “coercion,” and “incarceration.” Her demands for “public” space for theological ideas and overlapping “common goods” are not really contested by political liberalism. So Johnson pleads a case that is easily won, however richly wrought the pleadings. But the more brutal issues are: In whose name does one take up coercive force against citizens or aliens, or, deny writs of habeas corpus brought on the part of tortured detainees? Johnson does not offer pleadings in these bitter but pressing cases where Rawls and Connolly might seem like better friends.

There's so much gracious engagement here — a salutary practice if your political objective is finally “rich conversation.” Yet I feel the ungracious urge to provoke Johnson: The political theory and theology we need have to bear on the relation between religion, law, and force. The reason such theory must be concerned with individuals — let's call them persons, as John Rawls did — is because of the devastating things coercion does to human souls — always one soul at a time. This does not mean we must begin or end with ontological violence. But it does mean that we cannot avoid facing state force and the difference it makes to theory. This is especially true if we turn with open imagination to St. Augustine — who died in grief as the particular world he had loved with ambivalence and abandon met its end.