One sad spectacle of modernity was the effort to try to make law a god, and politics a religion.' In a letter to me, Patterson replies to my portrait of postmodernity by saying: What does a person like myself, who has no faith in God, do?' I think he has in mind my claim that conscience plays a crucial role in the sort of decisionmaking we have built into the American constitutional system, and my further claim that "there is no conscience without faith for without faith there is only expediency."

QUESTION: This is a provocation, not an argument. Does the author actually hold this view, or is he attributing a 'sad spectacle' to modernity in a loaded way? Worth interrogating the claim that conscience requires faith.

Philip Chase Bobbitt, Philip Chase Bobbitt - Refl…, loc. 402