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In this light it is significant that four years after the appearance of After Virtue came a landmark study in the sociology of religion, Habits of the Heart. In this book, Robert Bellah and his coauthors deployed a fascinating and compelling range of stories testifying to the damage American individualism has done to countless human lives and their communities. Taken together, After Virtue and Habits of the Heart seemed to be saying that the manifest incoherence of so many lives, including the lives of Christians, could not be addressed at the individual level, but rather could be ameliorated only by the careful reconstruction of communal bonds. Lives can be healed and integrated only within such communal contexts. As Bellah and his coauthors write near the end of their book, “We will need to remember that we did not create ourselves, that we owe what we are to the communities that formed us, and to what Paul Tillich called ‘the structure of grace in history’ that made such communities possible.” Which in turn means that the sustaining and strengthening of those communities—or, in MacIntyre’s terms, those “traditions of moral inquiry”—must be a major task for anyone who accepts these arguments.

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