New book: Essays on "Habermas and Religion"

 
Habermas and Religion

ed. by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, 
& Jonathan VanAntwerpen
(Polity Press, February 2013)

340 pages

 



Description

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.

Contents

Editors’ Introduction

I. Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities

1. Exploring the Post–Secular: Three Meanings of “the Secular” and Their Possible Transcendence - José Casanova
2. The Anxiety of Contingency: Reason in a Secular Age - Maria Herrera Lima
3. Is the Post–Secular a Return to Political Theology? - Maria Pia Lara
4. An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue - Nicholas Wolterstorff

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” - Thomas McCarthy
6. Having One’s Cake and Eating It, Too: Habermas’s Genealogy of Post–Secular Reason - Amy Allen
7. Forgetting Isaac: Faith and the Philosophical Impossibility of a Postsecular Society - J.M. Bernstein

III. World Society, Global Public Sphere, and Democratic Deliberation

8. A Postsecular Global Order? The Pluralism of Forms of Life and Communicative Freedom - James Bohman
9. Global Religion and the Post–Secular Challenge [pdf] - Hent de Vries
10. Religion in the Public Sphere: What Are the Deliberative Obligations of Democratic Citizenship? - Cristina Lafont
11. Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and Democratic Legitimacy - Maeve Cooke [video]

IV. Translating Religion, Communicative Freedom, and Solidarity

12. Sources of Morality in Habermas’s Recent Work on Religion and Freedom - Matthias Fritsch
13. Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation: Reflections on Memory Politics and the Post–Secular [pdf] - Max Pensky
14. What Lacks is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas - John Milbank

Reply to My Critics - Jürgen Habermas

Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s Work - Eduardo Mendieta


The essays are based on papers presented at a symposium on Habermas's work on religion that was held October 23-24, 2009, at the New York University.

Jürgen Habermas's reply is available in German in his most recent book "Nachmetaphysisches Denken II" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012) pp. 120-182.

Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the editor of "Habermas and the Public Sphere" (MIT Press, 1993) and the author of "Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream" (Routledge, 2007).

Eduardo Mendieta is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the editor of Habermas's "Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity" (MIT Press, 2002).

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

See also Eduardo Mendieta's interview with Jürgen Habermas: "A postsecular world society?" (2010) [pdf].