Product Description

What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? In recent years, Enlightenment secularization, as it appeared in the global spread of political structures that relegate the sacred to a private sphere, seems suddenly to have foundered. Unexpectedly, it has discovered its own parochialism - has discovered, indeed, that secularization may never have taken place at all. With the "return of the religious," in all aspects of contemporary social, political, and religious life, the question of political theology - of the relation between "political" and "religious" domains - takes on new meaning and new urgency. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished scholars from many disciplines - philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies - seek to take the full measure of this question in today's world. This book begins with the place of the gods in the Greek polis, then moves through Augustine's two cities and early modern religious debates, to classic statements about political theology by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Essays also consider the centrality of tolerance to liberal democracy, the recent French controversy over wearing the Muslim headscarf, and "Bush's God talk." The volume includes a historic discussion between Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, concerning the prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #220283 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 796 pages

Review
"Capacious, adventurous, and thorough, this collection of essays addresses the most significant and recalcitrant issues facing the modern world.... One reads it with a sense of desperation, for the urgency of the questions is profound, and one comes away from reading with a sense not of relief or gratitude, but of provocation - and of possibility." - Rosalind Carmel Morris, Columbia University"

About the Author
HENT DE VRIES is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida; and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Among the volumes he has edited are, with Samuel Weber, Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media. LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN is Professor of World Religions at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions, he was director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, and served as President of the American Academy of Religions (AAR).

Customer Reviews

A Future Classic
Edited by de Vries and Sullivan, the book seems more an affectionate (love) letter to Lefort/Laclau, and more generally, the anti-totalitarian / anti-Marxist literature coming out of French philosophical circles in the 70s/80s. Not only is there some great post-Lacanian stuff going on here, but between de Vries 90-odd page introduction and some of the essays, we can get a sense of how the secular liberal establishment is playing its hand in relation to the challenges of the 21st century: public religions, new economic/political agents, and so on. The book is an excellent resource for people wanting to be introduced to the topic (ie, so what is the relationship between religion, goverance and philosophy today), and/or with a background in the field and looking for 'scholarship'.

A few of the essays feel like after-thoughts, and there are some significant absenses / blind spots in the text. While writers like the Pope or post-80s Habermas make it into the text, Laclau and Mouffe seem to occupy the opposite extreme (though Wendy Brown's article is perhaps more daring). This is all fine and dandy, but it completely cuts out voices that would challenge this general tenor of argument while still taking on many of its themes. There is a noticeable silence from writers like Alain Badiou, or from the Speculative Realism camp. Was this an issue of space (probably not since they manage about 800 or so pages)? Was this a matter of timing (probably not, since much of the text draws from French sources, and would at least have been aware of recent philosophical currents)? More likely, an ideological preference that silences perhaps its harshest critiques, the book is nevertheless a brilliant overview of the issue from a particular school of thought, and both enlightening and enjoyable reading for serious thought.