Thank you. What I have in by way of conclusion is just a brief, you might say,

to mystic exhortation to you. When I thought about the youth and intellectual talent and

energy in this room, I thought I should finish with something which should be hopeful and more

exhortative.

Contemporary secular liberalism seems to many of us, and rightly so, culturally monolithic.

It's not only politically powerful in terms of the institutions of our governance, in its extremely secular format even,

but it's also intensively present in academic institutions

in ways we've just been discussing,

and increasingly, if steadily,

manifests in our corporate culture as major economic institutions

in the private sector fall all over one another

to testify to their secular liberal cosmopolitan bona fides.

But contemporary secular liberalism is also marked in its inner sanctum, that's to say in

its theoretical core, by profound and possibly insurmountable forms of incoherence.

The scientific atheism of thinkers like Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins,

aspires to provide us with a new secular metaphysics, an explanation of reality that is

materialistic, naturalistic, and sanitized of all religious belief.

But it's not one that leaves much room for any thick conception of real human freedom,

or for the modern sense of the autonomous free self and its rights,

or its meaningful appetites for happiness and meaning.

In fact, modern materialism could be said to evacuate

the modern liberal freedom of autonomy that stands at the heart of the modern rights

...