Description
Book SynopsisHow can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organise a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us?
These questions stand at the centre of
Roberto Mangabeira Unger's
The Religion of the Future. Both a book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion-the religion of the future-human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives.
Unger begins by facing the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. He goes on to discuss the conflicting approaches to existence that have dominated the last 2,500 years of the history of religion. Turning next to the religious revolution that we now require, he explores the political ideal of this revolution, an idea of deep freedom. And he develops its moral vision, focused on a refusal to squander life.
The Religion of the Future advances Unger's philosophical program: a philosophy for which history is open, the new can happen, and belittlement need not be our fate.
Trade ReviewA philosophical mind out of the Third World turning tables, to become a synoptist and seer of the First. -- Perry Anderson
A restless visionary. * New York Times *
One of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past. -- Lee Smolin * Times Higher Education Supplement *
His ideas are wide-ranging but essentially amount to a passionate call to stop thinking about everything in terms of economics and finance, what he calls "the dictatorship of no alternatives". * Financial Times *
