Description
Book Synopsis* Jurgen Habermas is among the most influential and important social theorists in the world today. * This volume represents the first sustained engagement with Habermas's recent turn to religion as a focus of philosophical inquiry.
Trade Review"Essential reading for philosophers and sociologists of religion and generally for anyone concerned with religion and politics."
LSE Review of Books "This groundbreaking book contains a number of penetrating and insightful essays on Habermas's recent work, and on the meaning of the secular and of postsecularism. It will undoubtedly take the debate on all these issues to a much more rigorous and fruitful level. A stellar collection, with papers of a very high quality."
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University "In 2001, shortly after 9/11, Jürgen Habermas's address 'Faith and Religion' attracted a great deal of attention. Until that time the topic of religion had not been a major concern in Habermas’s extensive oeuvre but he now began to speak of a postsecular age in which religion becomes a major topic in rethinking modernity and in meeting the challenge of religion in public life. This collection includes many of his most sophisticated interpreters and critics and Habermas, in his characteristic dialogical spirit, replies to each of his critics. Anyone seriously interested in the current state of the discussion about religion and public life will find this collection essential reading."
Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research "Jürgen Habermas has sometimes been called the pope of European secularism, but in recent years he has written frequently and appreciatively about religion without giving up his own position. This volume collects a number of very lively responses to these writings, many of them challenging Habermas in fairly sharp ways, and coming from those close to him, like Thomas McCarthy, and far from him, like John Milbank. The book ends with Habermas’s generous but firm response to his critics: altogether a most readable and thought-provoking book."
Robert Bellah, Professor Emeritus, University of California, BerkeleyTable of ContentsList of Abbreviations vii
Editors’ Introduction 1
Part I Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities
1 Exploring the Postsecular: Three Meanings of “the Secular” and Their Possible Transcendence 27
José Casanova
2 The Anxiety of Contingency: Religion in a Secular Age 49
María Herrera Líma
3 Is the Postsecular a Return to Political Theology? 72
María Pía Lara
4 An Engagement with Jurgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue 92
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Part II The Critique of Reason and the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment
5 The Burdens of Modernized Faith and Postmetaphysical Reason in Habermas’s “Unfinished Project of
Enlightenment” 115
Thomas McCarthy
6 Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too: Habermas’s Genealogy of Postsecular Reason 132
Amy Allen
7 Forgetting Isaac: Faith and the Philosophical Impossibility of a Postsecular Society 154
J. M. Bernstein
Part III World Society, Global Public Sphere, and Democratic Deliberation
8 A Postsecular Global Order? The Pluralism of Forms of Life and Communicative Freedom 179
James Bohman
9 Global Religion and the Postsecular Challenge 203
Hent de Vries
10 Religion and the Public Sphere: What are the Deliberative Obligations of Democratic Citizenship? 230
Cristina Lafont
11 Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and Democratic Legitimacy 249
Maeve Cooke
Part IV Translating Religion, Communicative Freedom, and Solidarity
12 Sources of Morality in Habermas’s Recent Work on Religion and Freedom 277
Matthias Fritsch
13 Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation: Reflections on Memory Politics and the Postsecular 301
Max Pensky
14 What Lacks is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas 322
John Milbank
Reply to My Critics 347
Jürgen Habermas (Translated by Ciaran Cronin)
Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s Work 391
Eduardo Mendieta
Notes and References 408
Bibliography of Works by Jürgen Habermas 465
Index 471
