For Feldman, the man of the cultural moment is Maimonides, the Sephardic renaissance figure famous for bridging the worlds of faith and secular knowledge.

"I'm not a utopian but an optimist," said Feldman. "I believe in the ability of people to reason with each other, and that includes believing people.

"In that sense, I come from the Maimonidean perspective. It's complex, but if you sum it up, it would be that the exercise of reason is itself a divine command. Reason has no reason to be afraid of religion, and neither does religion have reason to be afraid of reason."

Most readers and writers here at Talk to Action seem to favor a more separationist perspective on church-state issues, but it should be useful sometimes to also engage with legal scholars like Feldman who are daring to think of new ways to solve old problems.

The excerpt below (a conversation between Luis Lugo, the director of the Forum, and Noah Feldman) is from the transcript of The Pew Forum event. The entire transcript is long but worth reading.

[Mr. Lugo] And I recently came back from a trip to Europe, and every time I go to Europe I come back and look at the debates we have. Very fruitful, very important debates between what we call "strict separationists" and what we call "accommodationists." And it strikes me from a European context that in that comparison we're all accommodationists in some sense.

I've heard Rabbi Saperstein from the Religious Action Center wax eloquent on religion's role in public life. I've heard the same from folks from the Baptist Joint Committee. And these are "strict separationist" organizations. I mean, a lot of our strict separationists, as they're called, really are sort of religion friendly and want a strong role for religion in public life. There's the issue, of course, of government support and so forth, but in Europe it seems to me that it goes much deeper. I mean, this notion of laïcité doesn't get just at the question of government support. There's a very strong notion of religion being illegitimate in public life, with or without government support. So it does raise for me the question of the integration of Muslim immigrants into Europe and whether in a sense we don't have a strong comparative advantage in that regard because our generally accommodationist point of view is much more amenable to a Muslim understanding of the relationship of faith to public life than what they're finding in Europe.

MR. FELDMAN: First of all, I agree with that assessment, and it's one of the reasons that I haven't given up on the suggestion for a kind of a compromise, and it's precisely because we are not that far from each other. I mean, laïcité and what I call values evangelicalism really can't reach any common ground. They're just fundamentally opposed. But actually, I think there is a lot of overlap in the U.S. context when it comes to end state goals. I don't think, despite what people on the secularist side say, that many values evangelicals want to see some merger of religion in government. One hears this all the time from people on the left, by the way; not everyone is as eloquent as David Saperstein. One hears a lot of loose talk on the left about how the right wants to turn this into a theocracy, and that's clearly preposterous. So we don't have some call for that. And by the same token, there is interest, because of free speech principles, in people having the opportunity to express their beliefs and values - including religious beliefs and values - in the public square.

Also of interest is a radio show featuring Melissa Rogers and Feldman and a book review by Michelle Goldberg.