From Nietzsche to the present, the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by a secular thinking that has dismissed discussion of God as largely irrelevant. In recent years however, the issue of theology has returned to spark some of the most controversial debates within contemporary philosophy. Discussions of theology by key contemporary philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas have placed religion at centre stage. _Post-Secular Philosophy_ is one of the first volumes to consider how God has been approached (...) by modern philosophers and consider the links between theology and postmodern thought. Fifteen accessible essays present a clear and compelling picture of how key thinkers including Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida have made God a central part of their thinking. Each philosopher and how they have approached and criticised theology is placed in a clear historical context. Placing the collection in context with Phillip Blond's outstanding introduction, _Post-Secular Philosophy_ presents a fascinating discussion of the alternatives to the relativism and nihilism that dominate Western thinking. (shrink)

Today, most liberal states are torn between attempts to accommodate different religions within floating limits of tolerance, and at the same time trying to uphold a sense of national identity. The traditionally liberal way to negotiate this dilemma has, put bluntly, been to address religion as a generic category, relegate it to the private sphere, and to make religion an object of tolerance. This idea of a strict separation between religion and the secular rests on an Enlightenment notion of (...) a secular reason disembodied from tradition. Against such an understanding post-secular philosophers have sought to make tacit assumptions about the nature of reality explicit, and consequently, to make metaphysics relevant. This book explores the metaphysical assumptions that underlie different interpretations of the relationship between religion and the secular, faith and reason, and transcendence and immanence. Questioning the notion of secular reason as a neutral and ultimate adjudicator of religious difference, different answers to how people of diverse religious and cultural identities can live together peacefully are explored. (shrink)

From Nietzsche to the present, the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by a secular thinking that has dismissed discussion of God as largely irrelevant. In recent years however, the issue of theology has returned to spark some of the most controversial debates within contemporary philosophy. Discussions of theology by key contemporary philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas have placed religion at centre stage. _Post-Secular Philosophy_ is one of the first volumes to consider how God has been approached (...) by modern philosophers and consider the links between theology and postmodern thought. Fifteen accessible essays present a clear and compelling picture of how key thinkers including Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida have made God a central part of their thinking. Each philosopher and how they have approached and criticised theology is placed in a clear historical context. Placing the collection in context with Phillip Blond's outstanding introduction, _Post-Secular Philosophy_ presents a fascinating discussion of the alternatives to the relativism and nihilism that dominate Western thinking. (shrink)

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary is a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of eighteenth-century German philosopher, J. G. Hamann, the founding father of what has come to be known as Radical Orthodoxy. Provides a long-overdue, comprehensive introduction to Haman's fascinating life and controversial works, including his role as a friend and critic of Kant and some of the most renowned German intellectuals of the age Features substantial new translations of the most important passages from across (...) Hamann's writings, some of which have never been translated into English Examines Hamann's highly original views on a range of topics, including faith, reason, revelation, Christianity, biblical exegesis, Socrates, theological aesthetics, language, sexuality, religion, politics, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity Presents Hamann as the 'founding father' of a distinctly post-modern, post-secular theology and, as such, as an alternative to the 'postmodern triumvirate' of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida Considers Hamann's work as a touchtone of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, in view of debates with his friend Moses Mendelssohn Explores Hamann's role as the visionary founder of a 'metacritical' movement that radically calls into question the basic principles of modern secular reason, and thus reprises the debate between those defending Hamann's views and those labeling him the bête noir of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

El presente escrito tiene dos propósitos. En primer lugar, busca recapitular algunos temas abordados en los últimos años por el filósofo alemán Jürgen Habermas, como representante del liberalismo: a) la noción de sociedad post-secular, sus condiciones y desafíos; b) la tolerancia y el multiculturalismo; y c) la traducción como actividad mediadora que remedie la dificultad de comprensión entre el pensamiento secular de Occidente y las diferentes cosmovisiones religiosas tradicionales, de variadas procedencias. En segundo lugar, pretende ampliar el (...) panorama de Habermas con el apoyo de dos autores provenientes de otras tradiciones de pensamiento, y que permiten complementar y matizar algunas de las propuestas habermasianas: Michael Walzer, como representante del comunitarismo, y Peter Lamborn Wilson, alias Hakim Bey, como representante del postanarquismo. Esto para construir las bases de una forma más radical de pensar el fenómeno del pluralismo. (shrink)

Our global community desperately needs overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one's own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In (...) contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality--over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod--faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality's devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape. (shrink)

ExcerptIntroduction One of the most profound changes to have engulfed the interdisciplinary study of religion, society, culture, and history has been what is now commonly termed the “post-secular” turn. This intellectual development, which has been gaining a growing momentum during the last two decades, offers a “revisionist” reconsideration of the “orthodox” paradigm of secularization. This revisionism involves practically all of the paradigm components, questioning not only the descriptive-analytical merit of the secularization thesis but also its political and philosophical (...) implications. Critics have pointed to, among other things, the thesis's misevaluation of the role of religion—as an…. (shrink)

After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann is a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of 18th-century German philosopher, J. G. ...

Islamic education has been regarded as a thorn in the side of religious minority community integration into the nation state, and consequently to the expression of citizenship. Expressions of citizenship are associated with public participation while Islamic education is more readily associated with retreat and isolation of religious communities. At the same time the pervasiveness of religion in public life has led to calls for the post-secular—that is where religious communities are present in secular society. Habermas demonstrates (...) that a public which is literary constituted through critical rational communication is an effective means with which individuals can participate in the public sphere of modern society. Literary publics get constituted when three features are satisfied; writing, reading and discussing matters of common interest. The article considers the features of a literary public in relation to a review of some literature on the Deobandi education movement. The article argues that Islamic education at Deobandi institutions is able to constitute a literary public through the use of common texts in vernacular languages which are accessible to individuals who can then read and discuss them. The article suggests, then, that Islamic education within the Deobandi network of institutions opens up fascinating possibilities for expressing of post-secular citizenship requiring further research. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, the social scientific study of religion was dominated by debates surrounding secularization. Yet throughout its reign, secularization theory was subject to a series of theoretical and empirical challenges. Pronouncements of a forthcoming revolution in theory were frequent, yet secularization theory remained largely undisturbed. However, recent years have seen secularization theory decreased in status. Some have located its heir in the post-secular, yet the concept has invited fractious debate. This article surveys a range of engagements (...) with the post-secular, seeking to identify convergences that sit beneath an otherwise divided field. While this survey reveals the failure of the post-secular to fully supplant secularization theory, it does find that central debates in the field today have departed significantly from earlier generations of scholarship, particularly in a reflexivity toward the field’s basic concepts, a skepticism of teleological theories of history, and a renewed focus on the relationship between religion and politics. (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. The article examines the idea of a direct link between modernization and the loss of plausibility of religious belief, explores the contemporary image of the relation between religion and rationality, and shows why it is not possible to say that the advance of science leads to secularization. In view of the question regarding whether post- secularization entails the mutual exclusion of religion and rationality, it examines the proposals of J. Habermas and N. Wolterstorff, in a search for normative criteria for the dialogue between religious and non-religious rationalities. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to give a general and accessible overview of the so called “post-secular” turn in the contemporary humanities. The main idea behind it is that it constitutes an answer to the crisis of the secular grand narratives of modernity: the Hegelian narrative of the immanent progress of the Spirit, as well as the enlightenmental narrative of universal emancipation. The post-secularist thinkers come in three variations which this essay names as Enlightenmental, Traditional, (...) and Revolutionary. The first camp wishes to reconceptualize the place of religion in the seemingly secularized modern paradigm and see if revelation can cooperate with enlightenment, that is, if it can support the modern emancipatory values in the dangerous moment of their “crisis of legitimation.” The second one emphasizes the need to recover the institutional aspect of Christian theology which must be reinstated once again as the “queen of the sciences,” or as the true “invisible hand” operating behind social theories. And the third party, which simultaneously opposes both, enlightenment and tradition, revolves mostly around the “revolutionary figure” of Saint Paul and constitutes a radically leftist answer to the crisis of Marxism with its scientific insight into the objective laws of history. (shrink)

This book is a unique meditation on poetry, history, philosophy, religion, and politics from one of the most important poets of our time. It is the result of decades of deep thinking about the fate of poetry in human history as well as the nature of our shared human condition.

The postsecular turn within feminist theory refers to a renewed attention to religion within feminist scholarship. However, rather than conceptualizing the postsecular as a new moment within feminist theorizing that breaks with a previous trend of secular feminism, this article stresses that it is important to recognize the long history of coexistence and contestations between religious and secular feminist approaches. In this article, the different reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth are examined to elucidate and reflect (...) on the complicated relationship of the religious and the secular within feminist scholarship. Three different types of feminist theoretical engagement with the story of Sojourner Truth are examined and contrasted: the implicitly secular use of the story of Sojourner Truth in black feminist scholarship and theorizing of intersectionality, the explicitly religious interpretations found in the work of feminist and womanist theologians, and the deconstructive reading by Donna Haraway. In discussing and comparing these different engagements with the story of Sojourner Truth, it is stressed that the boundaries between the religious and the secular are perhaps less clear-cut than initially imagined, and that a dialogue between secular and religious feminist approaches is very fruitful. The article closes by examining how the complex intersections of gender, religion and race in the story of Sojourner Truth can be connected to the contemporary theorizing on the racialization of religion within critical race scholarship. (shrink)

ResumenEn la ética del discurso, Habermas afirma que la solidaridad es el reverso de la moralidad. Sin embargo, en 2013 rechaza esta tesis y ahora es vista como un concepto ético-político. Según Andrew Pierce, el giro post-secular de Habermas explica este cambio, pues él se habría vuelto escéptico hacia la razón secular. Habermas ha tratado de encontrar un recurso en la religión en lugar de la moralidad para sustentar la solidaridad. Pierce afirma que este movimiento es innecesario. (...) En cierta medida, Pierce tiene razón: Habermas no debería haber rechazado la tesis del reverso, en el sentido de que todavía la moral tiene una relación con la solidaridad. Sin embargo, el argumento de Pierce no es totalmente satisfactorio, en la medida en que existen buenas razones para proporcionar una revisión de la tesis. Basándose en estudios recientes sobre post-secularismo, el artículo desarrolla una noción de moralidad que puede tener la solidaridad como su reverso.Palabras clave: Habermas; solidaridad; post-secular; moralidad. (shrink)

Taking for granted a radical criticism of the universalistic value of a post-Protestant understanding of religion and of the nexus between political democracy and secularization, the article aims first at framing the perspective of multicultural jurisdictions within contemporary processes of change of religious pluralism on a transnational scale; secondly at framing that perspective within the intellectual tradition of legal pluralism; and finally at inquiring into the compatibility of the new conceptual constellation ‘post-secular society plus legal pluralism’ with (...) a liberal frame. (shrink)

In this article, I speak self-consciously as a man of faith addressing both believers and non-believers, but with the latter especially in mind. I suggest that we are currently witnessing (i) a highly significant departure from the ‘old’ model of liberal society that championed a sacred-secular divide, where the state was (only) a neutral umpire with a deliberately cultivated attitude of ‘studied public indifference’ to the ‘inner life’ of the vast host of (private) associations that itwas obliged to impartially (...) regulate, and (ii) a transition to a ‘new’ post-secular model of liberal society that champions and promotes a sacred-secular distinction (a complementary unity of distinct aspects), where the state is obliged to rethink itself and become (also) the state of its society. In this respect, it resembles the state in the era of Christendom. I hold that Rawls and Habermas are handicapped in their efforts to theorise post-secular society as a result of their strong anti-metaphysical posture. (shrink)

This paper explores the recent debates over secularization and particularly the familiar claim that the United States is significantly more religious than European societies. It argues that that conclusion is essentially correct but also that it must be qualified in many ways.

This book presents a number of contemporary philosophical issues from a wide range of Chinese philosophical texts, figures, and sub-traditions that are usually not addressed in English studies of Chinese philosophical traditions.

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible (...) results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time. (shrink)

This volume offer a manifold approach to a less evident and until now much neglected undercurrent in the work of Hannah Arendt., namely her ambiguous relation to the Judeo-Christian relligious heritage. Arendt's dissertation was dedicated to the concept of love in the works of Augustine, where she set her tone and developmed her frame for approaching theological matters. Her understanding of secularity might provide a model for the reconciliation of secularization and the persistence of religious belief in the contemporary world. (...) Thought Hannah Arendt wad certainly and outspokenly a secular thinker, her work also harbors ways of understanding secularization as the possibility of a new, maybe even messianic, attitude towards finite life and earthly reality. She famously depicts this attitude as "faith in and hope for the world". --Book cover. (shrink)

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible (...) results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular, where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the (...) notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it. (shrink)

The contemporary philosophical debate on autonomy shows several interesting perspectives that emphasize the role of social contexts for developing this human capacity. There is a shift from the classical notion of “moral” autonomy to the wider notion of “personal autonomy”, and we underscore the “substantive view” that helps to provide arguments that support a plausible notion strictly connected with socialization and language use. In this article, we consider the source of autonomy that is represented by a communicative life-world in its (...) ordinary and extra-ordinary dimensions to discuss the role of personal autonomy in a post-secular society. Moreover, we propose to adopt a pragmatic account to describe the social role of the autonomous agent in discursive contexts. (shrink)

The article appraises Habermas's recent writings on theology and social theory and their relevance to a new sociology of religion in the `post-secular society'. Beginning with Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Habermas revisits his earlier thesis of the `linguistification of the sacred', arguing for a `rescuing translation' of the traditional contents of religious language through pursuit of a via media between an overconfident project of modernizing secularization, on the one hand, and a fundamentalism of religious (...) orthodoxies, on the other. Several questions, however, must be raised about this current project. How far can Habermas engage adequately with religious ideas of the absolute while still retaining certain broadly functionalist theoretical premises? Is the notion of an ongoing secularization process in the `post-secular society' a contradiction in terms? What appropriate `limits and boundaries' are to be accepted between the domains of knowledge and faith, and how strictly can they be drawn? How coherent is the notion of `methodological atheism', and how consistently can Habermas pursue the project of a `religious genealogy of reason'? (shrink)

Islam in the Post-Secular Society offers an interpretation of the struggles that Muslims face within secular western society, and attempts to find a path for a future reconciliation.

In this article I analyse some of the reasons for a recent, resurgent interest in religion and theology by political philosophers and relate this interest to an inherent instability in modernity itself. In the first part I describe the landscape of current political philosophy with a particular emphasis on radical philosophers. In the second part I describe how the liberal distinction between religion and politics generates a theological instability due to the effective disappearance of the social embodiment of religion within (...) modernity. In the third part I draw some conclusions regarding the challenges the new post-secular condition presents to theology. (shrink)

In pre-democratic – also pre-modern – times, religion had been at the centre of much of human life, filling the private as well as the public realm of people’s daily existence. However, with the change to democratic rule in major countries in the modern world (see, most influentially, Article 1 of the French Constitution after the French Revolution and the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, influencing all other democracies in their wake), religion has for the most (...) part reflexively been sidelined from public life. Or has it? Does religion not still hold a special place in law in democratic societies, but now in reverse? Firstly, whereas matters of religious faith had throughout the greater part of human history been included in matters of politics, it is now as a matter of course of law excluded, purposely so. Religion is thus still a ‘special case’, a unique aspect of humanity when compared to all other matters, in law as much as in politics and other aspects of public life. Secondly, in the post-secular cultural climate dawning across the world, matters of faith (religion, spirituality) are no longer as stringently excluded from public life, which impacts directly on how religion is touched upon in law, sociology, philosophy, music and other academic disciplines too. Our dawning post-secular age is bringing something new. Two scholars, who have been doing foundational work in this regard, have done so fully in parallel, not taking cognisance of the mutualities in their academic contributions. Otto in Munich, Germany, has been combining his two areas of expertise, the Pentateuch in the Hebrew Bible and the sociologist Max Weber, to indicate the trajectory through history of democratic impulses from Ancient Near Eastern founding documents into the current era. Benson in Sydney, Australia, has on his part been drawing on his expertise in law as practised in Canada and taught in Europe, South Africa and Australia to indicate how, in inclusively liberal democracies, law cannot justifiably be used to exclude religion from the public domain, as has been the usual modern case. Drawing together these parallel contributions, Lombaard places these initiatives within the emerging post-secular climate, which augurs a different way of being religious or non-religious, publicly as much as privately, in democratic societies in our time. (shrink)

"Not but by the spirit understood" : Milton's plain style and present-day Messianism -- Areopagitica and the ethics of reading -- Liberty before and after liberalism : Milton's politics and the post-secular state -- Samson, the peacemaker : enlightened slaughter in Samson Agonistes -- Can the suicide bomber speak?

How to theorise religion in International Relations (IR)? Does the concept of post-secularity advance the debate on religion beyond the ‘return of religion’ and the crisis of secular reason? This article argues that the post-secular remains trapped in the logic of secularism. First, a new account is provided of the ‘secularist bias’ that characterises mainstream IR theory: (a) defining religion in either essentialist or epiphenomenal terms; (b) positing a series of ‘antagonistic binary opposites’ such as the (...) secular versus the religious; (c) de-sacralising and re-sacralising the public square. The article then analyses post-secularity, showing that it subordinates faith under secular reason and sacralises the ‘other’ by elevating difference into the sole transcendental term. Theorists of the post-secular such as Jürgen Habermas or William Connolly also equate secular modernity with metaphysical universalism, which they seek to replace with post-metaphysical pluralism. In contrast, the alternative that this article outlines is an international theory that develops the Christian realism of the English School in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism. Such a realism binds together reason with faith and envisions a ‘corporate’ association of peoples and nations beyond the secularist settlement of Westphalia that is centred on national states and transnational markets. By linking immanent values to transcendent principles, this approach can rethink religion in international affairs and help revive grand theory in IR. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the changes in perceiving the sacred which have appeared in the history of pilgrimage. These are linked with different theological approaches to space and subsequent periods of desacralisation, secularization and re-sacralisation. Relying on a modern theology of pilgrimage and research into the philosophy of religion by M. Eliade the paper offers a new interpretation of the message of the Camino de Santiago which overcomes previous reductionisms based on seeing the sacred (...) solely in the destination (the shrine). The relationship with the Camino and the content of pilgrim blessings indicate the role of experiencing order, beauty and these virtues which shape the relational order (corresponding with the virtue of _religio_). The effort of pilgrims is linked to this, however, it is no longer described in terms of ‘sacrifice’ although it is related to the same content which is perceived in a new post-secular cultural context. (shrink)

For the past two decades, philosophers of religion have paid close attention to the debates on public reason taking place within the context of political philosophy. Some thinkers claim that religious arguments should play a very limited role in political discourse, as this would amount to a politically sanctioned imposition of religious beliefs on people with different religious or non-religious worldviews. Others claim that excluding religious reasons would lead to an unfair exclusion of religious citizens from democratic processes. Underlying these (...) positions is a highly problematic idea of what it means to be a religious citizen. On the one hand, religious citizens are conceptualized as highly self-reflective theologians. Others instead imagine religious citizens to be wholly incapable of such self-reflection and of distinguishing between public and non-public spheres. In my article I attempt to criticize these underlying assumptions and point towards a more nuanced conception of the religious citizen. (shrink)

This book examines the post-secular idea of 'religion for non-believers'. The new form of unbelief which is dubbed as 'tourist atheism' is not based on absolute rejection of religion as a 'dangerous illusion' or 'mere prejudice'. Tourist atheists instead consider religion as a cultural heritage and a way of seeking perfection. What are the origins of these new forms of atheism? What are the implications of the emergence of a type of atheism which is more open toward religious (...) teachings, rituals, arts, and world views? Hashemi argues that public intellectuals must consider that it is a sign of a post-secular age in which believers and non-believers go beyond mere tolerance and engage in a creative process of co-practice and co-working. (shrink)

While Taylor and Habermas respectively follow communitarian vs cosmopolitan lines in their political theories, trends in each of their writings on religion in a global context have taken surprising turns toward convergence. However, what both views lack would be a further analytical and normative classification that better captures the pluralistic dimensions of this shared turn. I consider Taylor’s critique of Habermas’ appeals to constitutional patriotism that lead to recanting the exceptionalist thesis attributed to the USA in order to own up (...) to the exceptionalism of European secularity. I then take up the more pragmatic concern of the religion in a global public, using their writings on Islam in the USA and in the EU as a litmus test for the epistemic scope of our respective degrees of Jamesian openness, referring to the inherent potentials for the moral, social and political integration of immigrants and minorities into a more encompassing cosmoi politanism. (shrink)

ExcerptIt can be argued that we are currently living in a time characterized by a widespread perception of “discontinuity,” of a rupture in historical continuity. This rupture appears to have been brought about by the alleged demise of the secular paradigm, underpinning the Enlightenment project of modernity, caused by the outbreak of religious fervor and spirituality at the dawn of the new millennium. The perceived rupture in the natural progression of secular modernity has led to the questioning of (...) the assumed link of modernity and secularity1 and to the critique of Enlightenment theories and postulates regarding the disenchantment of the…. (shrink)

This volume is dedicated to the drawing of the implications of the contemporary 'post-secular' social transformation for education. Contributions discuss such topics as the mystical tradition and its social and pedagogic implications; transformative and ecological education; and the relations between secular and religious education in different local contexts.

Set principally in or around Seraing, an industrial region in decline just outside of Liège, in Belgium, the films of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne marry geographical and historical-social realism with a series of ethical inquiries into such topics as immigration, unemployment, black market trading and petty crime. To date, critical commentary on the films has tended mainly to read the work of the Dardennes along two lines. The dominant approach uses the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a philosophical touchpoint in (...) order to illuminate the ethical dimension of the Dardenne brothers' films. The second considers the political dimensions of their films. However a third, related body of writing has emerged in later years, one which understands in terms of their relation to what Jürgen Habermas (2006), amongst others, has dubbed the postsecular age. This article locates the Dardennes' films at the intersection between the ethical, the political, and the postsecular, looking to the theologically-inflected philosophy of Gillian Rose to make the case that Seraing serves as the model of what Rose refers to as “the third city” – a postsecular site which challenges easy divisions between politics and ethics. As such Seraing is not, I shall argue, a mere staging post for the moral, political and spiritual problems posed by the films, but its cradle. Paying particular attention to the Dardennes' film Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014) I demonstrate what an engagement that turns on existence with and within the city – an engagement that is both political and ethical – might look like. (shrink)

In the article, an analysis of the structure of the Russian life-world in a new post-secular situation is given. The author proposes description of religious structures in the life-world of Russian citizens. Religion again became part of the life-world of the society in Russia. Despite this fact, current post-secular situation generally means that Russian society is neither atheistic nor religious. The work is intended to describe the stages of ideological aspects of the process of secularization in (...) Russia, which led to the formation of post-secular society. To achieve this goal, several task were pulled out in the article solving the following problems: explication of the stages of secularization process, designation of the key features of Peter the Great phase of secularization, marking the parameters of Soviet secular society. Then the analysis of the reasons for the desecularization outbreak was given. In the paper, several conclusions were made: ideological secularization was at least actualized with the successful and effective expansion of Soviet ideology. The ideological infiltration began from the pre-school and school educational levels. This infiltration continued on the secondary and high level of education and was supported by the Soviet mass media, literature, and art. It was shown that the results of Soviet secularization at the micro-sociological level were unstable due to the lack of substantiate elements of the world-view for the Soviet ideology. The term ‘post-secular‘ in relation to the contemporary Russian situation should mean the choice of a certain situation, a ‘bifurcation point‘ in the transition to a new model of society. Post-atheistic Russia can be characterized by a situation where a smooth cultural process was interrupted by an explosive secularization after 1917. Current Russian traditionalism is based on the restoration of Orthodox culture. (shrink)