On the matter of “speaking in a relevant sense” where relevance involves both the communicative sense and an orthodox Christian sense:

My position certainly does not entail a wholesale rejection of “secular civilization,” or even of liberalism. Indeed, I think liberalism has done much good and has results from which no one would wish to back away. In particular, liberalism has been inventive in creating limitations on state power in order to encourage public cooperation for the maintenance of good community.

Precisely where I find much of my sense of outrage over the Bush administration’s dismantling of years of bringing corporations,  via economic disincentives,  to operate within limitations (the limit being placed on their propensity to maximize profits).  For Bush and Co.,  it has been an apparent aim to dismantle “regulation” by appointing people not versed first in matters of public welfare in a certain science (say ,  of environment, Health, Food Safety,  etc.)  , but rather people who are ideologically aligned with neoconservative’s and have gained their knowledge of their responsibility as lobbyists representing companies with interests in discrediting and dismantling government oversight (or ,  it might be more appropriate to say now,  “oversight” with the public interest in mind,  since the present sense of “government oversight” is to do less of it)

Part of the difficulty, however, is that the terms of justification for the limitations that liberalism builds within itself (such as limited government in the name of freedom of the individual) often become destructive policy for the individual, since individuals as such lose the means to know how to say “no” to the state.

Further problematic is how distortions of this “freedom of the individual” is twisted to apply to “corporations as individuals” in an attempt to jettison certain limitations on corporate abuse by saying that such limitations challenge the corporations’ rights (as if they were individuals) to make a profit. 

Theology Today – Vol 44, No.1 – April 1987 – SYMPOSIUM – Will the Real Sectarian Stand Up?

And this:

What I have argued in the past is not that Christians must avoid coalitions, but that we need to know better the theological justification for such coalition. What is required is not theory but actual engagement with other people in hopes of securing and finding common commitments. Such attempts to make those connections will often appear to be but gestures. But, in this sense, the most important aspect of politics is its gestures. Christians should never take comfort in the fact that their service to their society may at times be ineffectual. They should, however, seek policies designed to make cooperation possible, even if they appear at the time to be but a gesture. I am sure that Miscamble and perhaps Quirk may still find this all very abstract and would like me to be more concrete in terms of my own political agenda. I simply refuse, however, to say in the abstract that we ought to oppose Reagan’s SDI and support the sanctuary movement. I oppose SDI and support the sanctuary movement, but what is crucial is that the church be the kind of community that makes possible the kind of political discussion necessary for people, not positions, to be capable of making those alternatives real.