Habermas and Religion

by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Overview

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both religion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagement with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in philosophy, politics and social theory.

Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple trajectories of modernization in the contemporary world. He calls attention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical" thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societies that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public reason.

Habermas and Religion presents a series of original and sustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in the public sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections from leading philosophers, social and political theorists, and anthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both to Habermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project and to his most recent work on religion. The book closes with an extended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from one of today's most important thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745653273
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	12/23/2013
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Eduardo Mendieta is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook.

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is Director of the Program on Religion and the Public Sphere at the Social Science Research Council, New York.

Table of Contents

List 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