William Connolly, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, has argued persuasively in a number of books, including Why I Am Not a Secularist and A World of Becoming, that rethinking some of our dominant ideas about the self and the self’s place in a world with others will give us a better picture of how we actually relate to each other as human and political beings. His goal is to open us up to exploring the ways in which we are animated by passions such as love, disgust, contempt, and care. When we base our ideas of justice and politics on the unlikely premise that we can and should keep reason utterly separate from such “private” feelings, we may fail to see how our feelings are precisely what drive certain political beliefs and commitments, and then we may not understand how politics really works for us, or why our political relations to others matter to us so deeply.

Judith Butler has written that Connolly “moves us all to consider what it might mean, radically, to live democratically.” Cornel West adds that Connolly “is a towering figure in contemporary political theory whose profound reflections on democracy, religion, and the tragic unsettle and enrich us.” At times it takes work to follow his thinking: he asks readers to question things they think they already know. He does this, at least in part, in order to make us work harder for the meaning we make for ourselves.

Our conversation began one summer across a table strewn with bar food and beer bottles in Manhattan, continued by email throughout the following fall, and concluded over wine and Indian food in suburban Philadelphia in the spring.

—Jill Stauffer

I. YOUR LOVE AND YOUR DISGUST, TOGETHER, IN PUBLIC

THE BELIEVER: We’ve all heard that the personal is political, but the message doesn’t seem to have gotten through to many people involved in politics these days, where there is a widespread tendency to assert that we all have public personae, and what we do in our personal lives has nothing to do with politics. You have said that the predisposition to think in this way is a mistake both strategically and dispositionally.Why?

WILLIAM CONNOLLY: There are several intercoded divisions that come to us from secular liberalism that need to be reconfigured. The public/private divide is one, and the church/state divide is another. We have to look at these divisions differently, because no one consistently abides in either in its pure form. For instance, people are very interested politically in what TV programs others watch, in some cases because of a concern about the transmission of dispositions to violence, in others because...