Guadalupe in the Public Square: Religious Aesthetics and the Pursuit of Justice

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between religious aesthetics and justice in the pursuit of the societal common good. The orienting problem of the work is the tensive relationship between maintaining political stability and meaningful engagement with religious particularity in order to foster robust democratic participation, especially among communities that have been historically marginalized in American public life. This project interrogates the relationship between religion in public life through the specific locus of religious aesthetics: what role ought religious symbols—including images, narratives, music, liturgical practices—play in cultivating justice, or the minimum level of solidarity required for promoting basic human dignity in society? Each chapter illuminates the significance of a particular discourse in support this project. Chapter one exposes the relevance of Guadalupe as a religious symbol in public life. Chapter two forges a dialogue with John Rawls’s political philosophy, reiterating the necessity of an adequate framework for religion in public life that prohibits the ascent of particular comprehensive doctrines to inordinate influence over society’s basic structure while critiquing his framework for religion in public life as lacking adequate viability in a public context where limitation on religion in democratic speech about the most salient societal issues hinders participation of ethno-racially marginalized groups. Chapter three engages Martha Nussbaum’s response to these issues, highlighting her arguments pertaining to political emotions and aesthetics as crucial contributions to this framework. Nussbaum argues persuasively for a central relationship between emotions and cognition and, further, makes a convincing statement of the significance of aesthetics—primarily literature—in the cultivation of political emotion. Yet, Nussbaum’s work makes an unnecessary demand on religion in public life: that it be viewed as “civic poetry.” While this framework is less restrictive than Rawls’s framework, it does not yet articulate a robust appreciation of the positive meanings of religious pluralism, especially among individuals and communities for whom religious and public arguments are intertwined. Chapter four offers Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics as a crucial component to an adequate framework for forming community across difference. García-Rivera offers the basis for a more inclusive framework for religion in public life, however, his lack of substantive engagement with ethical issues pertaining to justice demands attention. With these pieces in place, the fifth chapter knits together this set of insights toward a more adequate framework for engaging religious pluralism in liberal context: aesthetic solidarity.