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S
omething there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down,"
wrote Robert Frost. Martha Nussbaum doesn’t cite Frost directly, but
the spirit of that poem hovers over her new book, even if what she has
in mind is less Frost’s rural New England than Thomas Jefferson and the
conventional shibboleths of East Coast liberalism. In this powerfully
argued and often moving book, Nussbaum, a distinguished professor of
philosophy at the University of Chicago, takes a deftly wielded
sledgehammer to the "wall of separation" between church and the state
much beloved of liberals–not, as some would have it, to allow a
religious takeover of the public sphere, but to make for a neutral
public sphere, safe for religious and non-religious citizens, of all
shapes and sizes.
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Yehudah Mirsky served in the State Department's human rights bureau in the Clinton Administration and is now a fellow at the Van Leer Institute and at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute.


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