"Postsecular Benjamin"explicates Benjamin's engagements with religious traditions as resources for contemporary debates on secularism, conflict, and identity.".

In this article, I engage with three overlapping expressions of the increasingly postsecular cast of social and cultural theory. These currents — guided, respectively, by genealogical critique, neo-vitalist social philosophy and postcolonial anti-historicism — seek to problematize the frame of previous radical theorizing by exposing definite connections between the epistemological and political levels of secular understanding, and by assuming that the nature of those linkages counts heavily against secularism. As well as offering an interpretive overview of these contributions, I suggest (...) that they are traversed by a number of conceptual flaws and inconsistencies. The tensions, I argue, stem from the fact that in spite of appearing to be driven by a strong anti-secular thrust, these positionings remain thoroughly intra-secular in character. This needs to be more emphatically acknowledged if the ‘postsecular turn’ is to be productive. (shrink)

It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the West and the revival of Confucian education in China, this paper examines what and how postsecular orientations and sensibilities penetrate educational discourses and practices in different cultural contexts. We compare the two movements to reveal a (...) new quality of hybrid modernization in that they react, in different ways, to certain pathologies that are identified as consequences of secular modernity. Burnout syndrome, the sense of a spiritual void, but also the loss of a spiritual and cultural identity are being perceived as correlating to a one-sided push towards a modernity that emphasizes secular rationalization over mindfulness and Westernization over cultural particularity. The two case studies mark a critical insight on the present condition and limits of secularism and highlights the ongoing negotiations of values and modes of self-cultivation in schools. In an increasingly pluralistic world, the entanglement of the secular, spiritual, religious and wisdom traditions provides the opportunity to rethink education as a creative realm and an impossible possibility to re-engage the minds and lives of those in the hybrid pedagogical time. (shrink)

The concept of the postsecular is a challenge to systematic theological thought, as it points to some context where the opposition between the religious and the secular, or between theism and atheism, is weakened or even surpassed. In this perspective, the postsecular is not about the visibility of religion in the public sphere, but about the way in which we interpret ourselves in the world in order to find orientation and fulfillment. In a postsecular context, religious perspectives and secularist outlooks (...) are no longer opposed of necessity, but draw on a common religious and secular heritage. In this article, Richard Kearney’s Anatheism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Deconstruction of Christianity are presented as exemplifications of postsecular thought that may open up new perspectives to systematic theology. In different ways, Kearney and Nancy reflect on a transcendent dimension in our experience or in the world, which is beyond the secular. Yet they distinguish themselves due to a religious transcendence-oriented approach and a secularist world-oriented approach, which shows that the opposition between the religious and the secular may be weakened, but the demarcations between the two still have their impact. (shrink)

In this essay, I critically examine Habermas’ approach to fundamentalism, a question that explicitly and implicitly alike bears influence on the formation of his postsecular thesis. The overview of his theory is followed by a combined analysis, depending on Torkel Brekke’s sociological study on fundamentalism, on the one hand, and a joint study by Adam Seligman and others in the field of anthropology and social theory. In this regard, questions of sincerity and authenticity are in the focus of my examination, (...) underlying that philosophical relevance of the question. On the basis of this combined analysis I argue that fundamentalism can be best analysed as an essential though specific element of modernity. I state that despite its critical attitude towards many developments of modernity, fundamentalism is not only reactively but, in its attitudinal core, a proactively modern phenomenon, and needs be interpreted accordingly as part of the evolving postsecular scenario. (shrink)

In this article I explain the origin of the concept “postsecular”. I argue that such concept, spread by Jürgen Habermas since 2001, has its origin in the reformist Jewish thought from 70’s in the United States. In this context, the postsecular is drafted as a phase which Jewish Theology is experiencing as result of its contact with secular lifestyle. Such contact summons to a reflection on ethic values which secularization missed. I argue that some of the meanings of the current (...) concept of “postsecular”, which Habermas articulates, were already present in the first uses of such concept from Eugene B. Borowitz and Emil Fackenheim. Finally, I argue that it might be set up a correlation between the ethical origins of the postsecular and the Habermas’s as “awareness of what is missing”. (shrink)

By drawing mainly, but not only, on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, I suggest that the postsecular turn provides a more substantial and insightful contribution to the understanding of religious pluralism in contexts of late secularization thanks to its focus on how the self-understanding of religious and secular actors is affected by their co-implication within the same discursive space. The ensuing attention for the processes of self-critique and reciprocal learning allows for a fairer distribution of the burdens (...) of participation, consistently with standards of parity which can be properly, but not exclusively, understood within an egalitarian liberal outlook. The participation to a shared conversation about the primary goods is seen, here, as a primary good in itself. I argue that it is possible to move away from this problem while still retaining the distinct awareness that the postsecular stance articulates about the role played by self-critical understandings of religious and secular views when it comes to the cooperative effort necessary to realize conditions of genuine epistemic parity and equal access to public discourse. To this purpose, I suggest that three further steps should be taken: the boundary between the religious and the secular should be more decisively conceived as a shifting and porous border, the resources of public discourse shouldn’t be too rigidly divided between argumentative and non-argumentative, and the presence of stoppers and enablers of public conversation should be acknowledged both in the religious and in the secular domain. The resulting kind of postsecular perspective will turn out to be relevant at two levels: that of the relationships between individuals who actively engage in public discourse and that of the relationships between religious and secular institutions. (shrink)

This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate (...) and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith. (shrink)

This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate (...) and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith. (shrink)

The claim that we are entering a “postsecular” age supposedly marks a new openness toward public religion, which was expected to wither as societies modernized. Similarly, postcolonial theory has attempted to think through the public resurgence of indigenous culture after the collapse of “Western” political regimes, which also predicted and prescribed its privatization. Drawing on the work of Partha Chatterjee, this paper argues that the “postsecular,” particularly as it is deployed by Jürgen Habermas and Alasdair MacIntyre, seeks to seduce religious (...) believers and practitioners into just this same logic of self-colonization so that they might be recognized as defenders of an increasingly insecure, liberal nation-state against those who might seek to take advantage of its vulnerability. (shrink)

In Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State, Robert Audi addresses disagreements among equally rational persons on political matters of coercion by analysing the features of discussions between epistemic peers, and supporting a normative principle of toleration. It is possible to question the extent to which Audi’s views are consistent with the possibility of religious citizens being properly defined as epistemic peers with their non-religious counterparts, insofar as he also argues for some significant constraints on religious reasons in (...) public debates, and he advocates secular reasons being considered as equivalent to natural reasons. I shall also consider Jürgen Habermas’s criticism of Audi’s stance. One of Habermas’ main points focused on Audi’s strong division between religious and non-religious arguments that requires religious citizens to artificially split their reasons, while non-religiously affiliated citizens are not met with any similar requirement. Also, analysing the concept of epistemic parity, we can as well grasp some of the main features of the Habermasian idea of postsecularism. The difference between secular and postsecular views can be framed as hinging on what it means to be epistemic peers, thus bearing consequences on the understanding of the relationship between church and state—particularly regarding the nature of state neutrality and the different status of churches and organised secular groups. (shrink)

This article analyses how recent critiques of secularism in political philosophy and cultural anthropology might productively be combined and contrasted with each other. I will show that Jürgen Habermas' postsecularism takes insufficient account of elementary criticisms of secularism on the part of anthropologists such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. However, I shall also criticize Saba Mahmood’s reading of secularism by arguing that, in the end, she replaces the secular–religious divide with a secularity–piety divide; for example, in her reading (...) of Nasr Abu Zayd’s secular Islamic hermeneutics. This inhibits the use of her framework of analysis for a criticism of a problem central to Habermas' postsecularism, namely that it remains focused on specific intensities of belief. I shall then argue that, combined with the anthropological critiques of the secular, the political-historical nature of the fanaticism–piety–violence nexus should be integrated into political philosophical debates on secularism and postsecularism. (shrink)

Continental philosophy of religion has been dominated for two decades by "postsecular" and "postmodern" thought. This volume brings together a vanguard of scholars to ask what comes after the postsecular and the postmodern that is, what is Continental philosophy of religion now? Against the subjugation of philosophy to theology, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion argues that philosophy of religion must either liberate itself from theological norms or mutate into a new practice of (...) thinking in order to confront the challenges religion presents for our time. The essays do not propose a new orthodoxy but set the stage for new debates by reclaiming a practice of philosophy of religion that recovers and draws on the insights of a distinctly modern tradition of Continental philosophy, confronts the challenge of rethinking the secular in the light of the postsecular event, and calls for a move from strictly critical to speculative thought in order to experiment with what philosophy can do. This collection of essays is indispensable for anyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and theology, political questions regarding religion and in what contemporary speculative Continental philosophy has to add to philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of John Caputo’s philosophical interpretation of ‘the event’ as a form of revelation with specific reference to political theology and in dialogue with the theological notion of ‘interruption’ by the fundamental theologian Lieven Boeve. Following Charles Taylor’s interpretation of the post-secular, the argument is that Boeve’s ‘radical hermeneutics of religion’ is more postmodern than Caputo because it presents religion as co-constituted with language, particularity, and contingency and grounded within the specificity of the Christian narrative.

This article critically engages the postsecular turn in feminism by focusing on recent contributions by Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Saba Mahmood, whose stance can be seen as symptomatic of the postsecular moment. The article demonstrates that their conjoint theoretical moves have unintended yet important implications, which are left unexamined. Whilst recognizing the importance of the effort of postsecular feminism to think of agency beyond the limitations of Eurocentric theorizing, the article argues that it remains unclear whether the particular conceptualization (...) of agency, as detached from autonomy, can have counter-hegemonic effects. The article is concerned with the politics that the postsecular turn in feminism authorizes, and for this purpose it questions to what extent postsecular feminist theorizing risks the neutralization of critical social theory itself, because abandoning autonomy as the foundation of political subjectivity does not allow for the interrogation of arbitrary authorities and the social inequalities that they sustain. (shrink)

This review essay reflects on two works that pertain to the postsecular: Josef Bengtson, Explorations in Post-Secular Metaphysics ; and Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, Guido Vanheeswijck, eds., Working with a Secular Age: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor’s Master Narrative. The profound influence of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is well illustrated in these two works under review. The review essay situates postsecularity in the context of debates on secularization and the sociological expectations this process generates. By treating postsecularism in (...) terms of contextualisation, metaphysics arises as a default position pertaining to transcendence in Bengtson’s work. The efforts in the Zemmin, Jager, and Vanheeswijck work to steer the Taylor work in the direction of Islam are given a critical appraisal. A particular outcome of postsecularity is to render as untenable sociology’s customary detachment of religion from theology. Lastly, for Catholicism, postsecularism draws attention to a long-standing and long-denied crisis in the reproduction of belief in modernity and in a secularized Europe in particular. A singular exception to this crisis occurs in Scandinavian countries, notable for their absence of religion, which are experiencing a small, but significant renaissance of Catholicism. This opens out a positive side to debates on postsecularity which indicates that it is not solely about mirages which give comfort to secularized forms of sociology. (shrink)

This article critically examines the postsecular literature with the aim of dispelling the scepticism about the concept’s theoretical import, critical power and analytical utility. It first presents an overview of the literature identifying two major fields, social theology and politics, within which three major critical leitmotifs are developed: (1) disenchantment and the loss of community; (2) the impossibility of absolute secularity; and (3) the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. In the second section, the shortcomings of problematizations (1) and (...) (2) are highlighted, originating from social theology, and it is argued that they have limited critical potential as they intend to renaturalize the religious. Instead, it is asserted that the concept has critical power when used within the context of a postreligious denaturalization of the secular. In the last section, the focus shifts to the analytical utility of the concept, and the article examines ‘postsecular society’ and ‘postsecularization’ in the light of the previous discussion. (shrink)

The tendencies of postsecularism in the social life of today's Ukraine are especially significant in their influence on the quasi-religious context of religious worships practiced in the country. These factors erode the modernity basis of the society, and Ukraine appears in the contradictory situation of its intention to complete the modernisation process and oppose the antiglobalistic isolationism. The neo-Protestant teachings and practices are obviouly connected with the principles of liberalism and consumerism. Neo-Oriental and new syncretic religions show that they (...) produce significant influence on spreading globalistic views in the Ukrainian society. The marginality characteristics of new religions prove the idea that their values are a challenge to the essentialistic dichotomies of the Ukrainian traditional churches. The sociocultural and political context of globalisation and postmodernism includes religious transformations axiomatically, and the impact of both on the late capitalism stage is evident in different contexts. The culture of postmodernism makes this process complicated in the countries which are still between modernity and postmodernity. The processes of 'label change' are important with the stress on the substitution of the rationalistic foundation by quasi-scientific teachings. The conclusions demonstrate that the very incompleteness of the modernity has led to the expansion of the quasi-religious techniques in the social and cultural life of Ukraine. The erosion of the modernity values results in spreading new religions, which became vivid at the end of the last century. As globalisation promotes syncretic and neo-Oriental religions, antiglobalistic movements are supported by neo-pagan techniques and practices. (shrink)

This article explores the various uses or – according to some authors, such as the sociologist James Beckford – misuses of the term ‘postsecular’. The variations in its use are indeed so broad that the question is justified whether the terminology as such has much analytical value. The prominence of the ‘postsecular’ in present-day debates in my view primarily indicates the inability among scholars, intellectuals and religious interest groups to come to grips with what – for some at least – (...) is an unexpected presence and resurgence of religion in the public domains of presumably secular societies. The work of the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad shows that the secular does not preclude the religious. All kinds of religious arguments, organizations, and agents are very much present in modern ‘secular’ societies. From this perspective, the emergence of the ‘postsecular’ refers to very real phenomena, most importantly the intertwinement of the secular and the religious. For instance, religious actors do not accept the barriers of secular society and claim a role for religion in public and secular arenas. This insight could be one of the most important driving forces behind the popularity of the term ‘postsecular’ in recent years. (shrink)

Abeysekara contends that democracy--along with its cherished secular norms--is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future.

Current debates on ‘the postsecular’ focus on the alleged new visibility of religion in the public sphere. They overcome earlier neglect or indifference toward religion by acknowledging its importance and cast doubt on traditional binaries between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’. How should systematic theology take up the challenge of these debates? Is ‘the postsecular’ a chance to reconsider religion beyond modernist critiques or should one be critical of too easy celebrations of ‘the return of religion’? As an introduction to a special (...) issue on this theme, this article argues that theology should take it as a chance for new dialogues with unexpected allies, opponents, and critics. This calls for an attitude of openness and a willingness to think anew, without losing one’s roots in a specific orientation. Theology’s contribution can be rethinking core notions from the theory of religions, asking for the specific perspective that religion may introduce and the constructive reinterpretation of – partly forgotten – symbols of religions. After discussing the state of the art in debates on ‘the postsecular’ in the first article, the other contributions of this special issue take up these theological tasks in dialogue with thinkers like Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Paul Ricoeur. (shrink)

The fact that ethics, as understood and practiced in our Western culture, has definitively come to a dead end, is overlooked only by those academic philosophers for whom it is still an esoteric and self-sufficient matter of proper reasoning regarding morality. Both religiously and secularly conceived theories have failed; it is especially evident in the fact that we have never thought about ethics as much and acted according to moral principles as rarely as today. Ethical reflection and moral conduct have (...) long ago become incompatible worlds, and relate to each other in an inversely proportional relationship. On this background an eternal question is raised once again: Can the difference between ethical thought and moral action on one side, and secular and religious approaches on the other, be overcome within a single ethical-moral concept? This paper presents an investigation of a postsecular ethics together with examining its basis and possibilities of bringing action motivated beliefs together with critical, responsible thinking based on personal autonomy in a consistently experienced and, at the same time, reflexive constellation. (shrink)

What is referred to as the “postsecular” situation is most properly conceived as an arc of trans-Atlantic self-understanding unfolding dialectically in the face of and in response to traumatically rapid, unprecedented patterns of globalization. I am myself so deeply immersed in the postsecular debates1 that I do not know whether this—what is meant to be—straightforward thesis strikes the reader as simple and self-evident, or rather as profoundly confused and jargon-riddled. Either way, my intention in this paper is to unpack the (...) terms used in my claim, flesh out their content and contexts, and attempt thereby to make the proposition as…. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relation of religious language and public debate within the context of postsecularism and defend a falsificationist model. I argue that the postsecular public sphere...

ABSTRACT Reason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary (...) explicitly and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement. (shrink)

An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, (...) which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide…. (shrink)

The continuing power of racist ideology threatens liberal democracy, for racism is more than a personal bias or a social construction. It is an ideological framework that reduces human beings to an existence along a color-coded spectrum, with people designated as “white” at the top of the hierarchy and people designated as “black” at the bottom. One has to see this ideology clearly in order to choose a proper response and then act accordingly. First, the reality of “race” has been (...) exposed as unscientific and illusory, and as based not on biology or genetics, but on a legacy of empowerment for some and enslavement for others. Second, this racist ideology, part of our disenchanted, secular age, is exposed as a continuing form of enchantment in its manner of seeing the world, opening the possibility for a spiritual response. Third, dismantling this racist ideology requires a reimagining of “blackness” as a source of life and spirituality, as a way of countering and rewriting the dominant racist narrative. Fourth, a postsecular spiritualty, based on the work of Pope Francis—that emphasizes the importance of protecting our common human dignity, of caring for each other, and of “walking together”—can be engaged as a path for action in the battle against racism. (shrink)

Se examina la idea de un vínculo directo entre modernización y pérdida de plausibilidad de la creencia religiosa, se explora la imagen contemporánea de la relación entre religión y racionalidad, y se muestra cómo no puede afirmarse que el avance de la ciencia conduzca a la secularización. Ante la pregunta, si la postsecularización conlleva una mutua exclusión de religión y racionalidad, se examinan las propuestas de J. Habermas y N. Wolterstorff, buscando criterios normativos para el diálogo entre racionalidades religiosas y (...) no religiosas. (shrink)

The article argues that frequently-voiced critiques of Rawls’s political liberalism have been misguided, because the ignore the extent to which Rawls takes his inspiration from a particular historical experience, namely that of the USA. The article suggests that a better model to accommodate the European historical experience would be a ‘symbolic’ presence of religion in public political argument: In a situation of world-view pluralism, politicians are well advised to show how the values and coercive laws they promote can be derived (...) from within one or a number of) particular religious traditions. Such attempts will be particularly valuable where they are symbolic, in the sense that they are undertaken by politicians who do not themselves belong to the religious tradition(s) in question. (shrink)

Habermas se ha valido a menudo de la expresión "sociedad postsecular" para referirse al proceso de aprendizaje mutuo entre la razón ilustrada y la conciencia religiosa en el seno de las sociedades modernas. Esa expresión es utilizada por el pensador alemán en dos acepciones distintas. Unas veces la emplea como categoría sociológica descriptiva y otras como categoría filosófica de carácter normativo. En este trabajo rechazamos el uso descriptivo del concepto de sociedad postsecular, haciéndonos eco de las críticas que contra él (...) se han vertido desde la sociología de la religión contemporánea. A la vez, reconocemos el interés que reviste la propuesta normativa de Habermas. Tras exponer el sentido preciso de esa propuesta, examinamos la principal acusación que contra ella cabe formular: la de funcionalismo religioso. (shrink)

While one of the arguments against religious belief relates to its apparent irrationality, it can be shown phenomenologically that there is a different kind of rationality at work in religious knowledge, undermining the sharp distinction between sacred and secular that enables theology to be marginalised as irrational. Approaching Christianity through the category of revelation, that is, as a way of living and believing that draws not only on founding narratives of revelation but on the ongoing ‘experience’ of transcendence in unveiling (...) truth, I seek to examine how the possibility of truth itself can inspire hatred and so open onto violence. ‘Religious’ violence typically emerges from a hatred directed at otherness. Hatred of what truth reveals is a powerful motivation for violence, but it cannot be shown that this is specifically religious. Nevertheless, otherness is characterised by an excess that resists objectification and may be revelatory of truth. Violence may be religious precisely to the extent that it is directed against the otherness before which each person stands accused. (shrink)

This article focuses on Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Axial Age, some of its critical appropriation, and how in particular Habermas has returned to this idea, after several critical engagements with Jaspers’s work through his long scholarly productivity. The article, however, centers on Habermas’s selective and critical use of Jaspers’s notion in his own latest and extensive engagement with what he calls “a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking.” The goal of the article is to identify the ways in which Habermas is (...) refurbishing Jaspers’s generative concept, but at the same time, how his work on postsecular consciousness opens itself to some liabilities by not taking enough distance from the concept. (shrink)

This article deals with the concepts, processes, and antagonisms that are associated with the notion of postsecularity. In light of this article’s expanded interpretation of José Casanova on the secular and secularization, as well as thoughts on James A. Beckford’s take on public religions, five rubrics on the postsecular derived from critical theory and an understanding of ‘reflexive secularization’ are presented. This term focuses on secularization processes and how these practices unleash complementary as well as antagonistic tendencies, a confrontation of (...) normativities and specific social-empirical challenges. From this basis it is argued that social-empirical analysis should focus on non-naturalistic relations between individuals occupying structurally equivalent positions in narrative networks. A plurality of normativities are seriously considered as ideas circulating through social relations where the critical competence of the participants of such communication processes are provoked to subvert anything – including any normative positionality – as taken for granted. Moves towards the decolonization of the secular/postsecular dyad are emphasized, with ramifications for thinking about the urban, which point to the universal and authentic foundations of the human condition that are brought into play. (shrink)

This article seeks to demonstrate that in his recent reading of the role of religion in the postsecular public realm, Habermas overlooks a most fundamental dimension of religion: its power to symbolically institute communities. For his part, Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this fundamental dimension is central. In his evaluation of the role of religion in postsecular society, he therefore arrives at results which are very different from those of Habermas. However, I believe that Gauchet too (...) underestimates the extent to which religion’s power of symbolic community institution has remained intact within modern, postsecular society. In support of this position, I show how relatively heterogeneous phenomena within Western societies, such as the renewed importance of religion in the public realm, the revival of certain forms of nationalism and the associated demand for recognition of group rights and hence for forms of legal pluralism, may prefigure a new transformation of the public realm. (shrink)

The ethical features of citizenship in democratic societies have been explored from several perspectives. This account is based on the analysis of our condition as co-practitioners in civil society and aims to address the public role of religions and to include multiple forms of citizenship. Under conditions of pluralism, one’s involvement in cooperative practices is shaped and unsettled by the presence of co-practitioners who carry different self-understandings about the relationship between their beliefs and their social agency. Social cooperation is threatened (...) when these self-understandings come into conflict. The notion of postsecularism provides a valuable clue for better understanding this kind of conflict, thanks to its focus on how the self-understanding of religious and secular actors is affected by their co-implication in the same public space. Within this framework, I suggest that a reflective consideration of the practical cooperative relationships that ordinarily characterize our agency as actors of civil society may adequately ground a normative ethics of citizenship. This reflective awareness affects the self-understanding of both religious and secular citizens, and normatively points towards a disposition to cooperatively re-arrange and re-formulate one’s own beliefs and arguments in the light of the structural co-implication of one’s own belief with the beliefs of others. The basic duties of citizenship emerge from the implications of participating in a body of social practices that extends to different communities of practice at a local, national and global level. This ethics of citizenship is therefore not bound to membership in a specific political entity. (shrink)

Starting point of this article is a tension perceived in postsecular reassessments of religion between a new openness to religion’s meaning and importance and a negative motivation, due to religion’s violent presence. These negative conditions may hinder assessing religion in its fullness and specific character. Further reflection on the right attitude to study religion and a way out of this tension is given by analyzing Paul Ricoeur philosophical approach to religion in The Symbolism of Evil. A detailed investigation of Ricoeur’s (...) text is necessary to find out why he, as a philosopher, turns to religious language for reflecting on what he calls ‘the reality of evil’. The outcome of this study provides a critical perspective for discussing current reassessments of religion, as well as recent debates on the use of the concept of evil. This discussion will focus on the importance of approaching religion as dealing with fundamental existential questions, including when the topic of evil is concerned. Such a deliberate and positive approach to religion does not exclude criticism. A constructive approach to religion like Ricoeur’s seems necessary to really make sense of the ‘postsecular’ perspective as bridging the gap between religious and secular approaches. (shrink)

This article interprets critiques of secularity and the related concept of history as progress in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Judith Butler. At the same time, it defends their approach against the criticism voiced by Gregor McLennan. It shows that the postsecular conception of the politics of both authors is not just an attempt to open public space to a wider range of religious and cultural voices. Rather, it is a critique of the way in which political secularism and (...) the ideology of progress are used by the modern state to legitimize the exercise of its own power. Butler and Chakrabarty's postsecular policy is thus based primarily on coalition building against these legitimization frameworks, which opens up the possibility of forming new postsecular political subjects. It illustrates the theoretical approach of both authors with an example of the church sanctuary movement in Germany. (shrink)