Guest Editor's Note

This issue is special in at least three senses. The articles within were originally delivered as presentations at the Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought Unit during the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. The unit's theme that year was “Pragmatism, Empiricism, Metaphysics and Social Activism” in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition and Cornel West's Democracy Matters. The essays by Mary Leah Friedline, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., and Tracey Mark Stout do an excellent job of analyzing and extending the thought of Stout and West given the current political moment. Regarding that moment, this issue is also special in that its contents, other than this introduction, were written prior to the 2024 United States presidential election, but the issue will be published after that election. I consider this fact to constitute a true pragmatic test of ideas. Will the work of Stout, West, and their interpreters strike readers as still relevant or curiously genteel given that Donald Trump has officially been reelected President of the United States? Finally, this issue is special in that it contains the first printed critical engagement with my book God the Created of which I am aware. If you are a reader of a certain age, a Sesame Street song about one thing not being like the others may run through your head when comparing the title of Joe Pettit's essay with the others. However, as I attempt to show in my response to all these authors, figuring out the configuration of and working with the rights sorts of communities is the crucial unifying thread for all these projects, whether they be pieces of political pragmatism or philosophical theology. I am just not convinced neopragmatists or transcendental pragmatists have discovered the right character, method, or goal of such communities when compared with classical pragmatists such as Charles Peirce.