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Religions and the postnational constellation
Granted that there is a global economy, global culture, global law, global civil society, even global festivals, why are global institutions both so promising and so weak? I want to turn to Jürgen...
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Anti-secularism
More than most other great systematic thinkers of our time, Jürgen Habermas has for decades consistently expressed his views on the burning issues of the day, finding inspiration for his philosophical...
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Inclusion and accountability in the public sphere
In his essay “Religion in the Public Sphere,” Habermas joins the debate between liberals and critics of liberalism on the proper role of religion in the public sphere. His proposal focuses on what each...
View ArticleReligious reasons & secular revelations
That Jürgen Habermas and I probably agree on most fundamental issues does not mean that there are no differences between us; indeed we have engaged in a friendly debate over some of our differences...
View ArticleTaking religion seriously
Christina Lafont recently posted an interesting and forceful post at The Immanent Frame comparing the views of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on the place of religion in the public sphere, and while I...
View ArticleAn ideal of conscientious engagement
Many political theorists, pundits and even presidential candidates have advocated some variation on the claim that religious and secular reasons have a differential justificatory potential: at least...
View Article“Recognizing” religion
Religion appears in liberal theory first and foremost as an occasion for tolerance and neutrality. This orientation is reinforced by both the classification of religion as essentially a private matter,...
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Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics
Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im’s Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a. Charles...
View ArticleSecularism and critique
I would like to add a footnote to Saba Mahmood’s excellent piece “Is Critique Secular?” I think it’s important to explain the power that an affirmative answer to this question carries in our...
View ArticleThe renouncers
What has become clear to me in recent years is that the old dream of progress, which used to be assumed, is being replaced in popular culture by visions of disaster, ecological catastrophe in...
View ArticleTranslation and transformation
In my last post, I closed with two questions relating to Jurgen Habermas’s recent work on religion and the public sphere: First, is a genealogical or language-theoretical reconstruction of reason...
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The philosopher-citizen
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short...
View ArticleOpen thread: The power of religion in the public sphere
Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together yesterday in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.” In an electrifying symposium convened by the...
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Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in conversation
In a symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles...
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Rethinking secularism: The power of religion in the public sphere
A dialogue with Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West On October 22, 2009, over 1000 people gathered in the vast and venerable Great Hall at New York City’s Cooper Union to...
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A postsecular world society?: An interview with Jürgen Habermas
The following is a short excerpt from a recent interview with Jürgen Habermas. Click here to read the interview in its entirety [pdf]. Translated by Matthias Fritsch. * * * EM: Over the last couple of...
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The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere
In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West interrogate the specificity of religious and secular reasons, dispositions, and ethical...
View ArticleNew Habermas dialogues on religion and secularism
An op-ed by Stanley Fish in Monday’s New York Times discusses a new publication comprising the proceedings from a course of dialogues between Habermas and four Jesuit academics in 2007. They have...
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Muslims in European public spheres and the limits of liberal theories of...
Recent events in Europe, from the cartoon crisis in Denmark to the controversy over the construction of minarets in Switzerland, have brought the status of Islam in the secular public sphere to the...
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Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters
With this essay by Vincent Pecora—co-director, with Jonathan Sheehan, of “After Secularization,” an SSRC summer research fellowship on new approaches to the study of religion and modernity—we introduce...
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Waiting for Godot, who is either late or not coming at all
Vincent Pecora—co-director, with Jonathan Sheehan, of “After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity,” one of the five research fields of the 2010 SSRC Dissertation Proposal...
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An empirical perspective on religious and secular reasons
This “religion in the public sphere” thread has featured debates about whether citizens of liberal democratic societies can offer religious reasons for public laws that will be coercive on all...
View Article“Leadership and Leitkultur”
Jürgen Habermas, in The New York Times: To the present day, the idea of the leitkultur depends on the misconception that the liberal state should demand more of its immigrants than learning the...
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Habermas and Religion
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...
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Religion as a catalyst of rationalization
The centrality of religion to social theory in general and philosophy in particular explains why Jürgen Habermas has dealt with it, in both substantive and creative ways, in all of his work. Indeed,...
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El poder de la religión
El poder de la religión en la esfera pública, the Spanish language edition of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, will be released late this month by Trotta Editorial: Muchas de las opiniones...
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What we talk about when we talk about the postsecular
Recently, a somewhat opaque term found its way onto the front page of The Immanent Frame in the title of Daromir Rudnyckyj’s piece on “post-secular development.” This term, “postsecular,” also came up...
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Religion’s many powers
Excerpted from the afterword to The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. It has now been twenty-five years since Richard John Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square—an effort to understand what lay...
View ArticleThe post-secular: A different account
John Boy, in a post on March 15th, titled “What we talk about when we talk about the postsecular,” provides a brisk empirical overview of his key word’s appearance in recent discourse. But it is not at...
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Religion und Öffentlichkeit
The German translation, by Michael Adrian, of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere will be published by Suhrkamp Verlag in October. From the publisher: Lange Zeit hatte es den Anschein, als sei...
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The political theology of freedom and unfreedom
Given the attention lavished on political martyrdom in Islam over the last decade, Paul W. Kahn’s focus on other—and specifically “our”—practices of sacrificial death is welcome. Throughout his...
View ArticleJürgen Habermas on myth and ritual
This video is an excerpt of a lecture by Jürgen Habermas, delievered at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs on October 19th. The philosopher “explored the evolution of myth and...
View ArticleWhat are the uses of religion?
Raising issues central to post-secularism, Ryan Gillespie reviews three distinct recent works—Steven D. Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution,...
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The context of religious pluralism
Akeel Bilgrami’s article, “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” is an important and welcome contribution on a topic that has acquired momentum with the renaissance of the public role of religions, in...
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Enter the Post-Secular
The following is excerpted from a chapter in The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, a joint publication of the Social Science Research Council and New York University...
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The view from Berlin: An interview with Hubert Knoblauch
Hubert Knoblauch is a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Berlin, where he specializes in general sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of religion. A student...
View ArticleCFP: Post-Secularism Between Public Reason and Political Theology
Guest Editors Camil Ungureanu and Lasse Thomassen are requesting submissions for a special issue of the journal The European Legacy scheduled for late 2014: In recent years, leading philosophers,...
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The theology blind spot
I have always been puzzled by the fact that Charles Taylor starts his book A Secular Age with a long quote from Bede Griffith in order to describe a religious type of experience. It is the description...
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Faith as an Option
Hans Joas’s Faith as an Option is concerned with debunking two myths: first, the idea that modernization—advances in technology and the sciences—renders religious belief obsolete; second, the argument...
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A thought-provoking study
In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood has produced a valuable account both of how the idea of separating religion from politics came to be central to the development...
View ArticleA cautious rapprochement: Habermas and Taylor on translation and articulacy
In the past ten to fifteen years, discussions around the contested role of religion in the political public sphere have often centered on Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, for many obvious and...
View ArticlePope Francis and intellectual humility
A certain humility is increasingly apparent in the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict’s formal public apology in 2010 for the Church’s sex abuse scandals might well be viewed as the annunciation of a...
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