Habermas and the `Post-Secular Society'
- 1 November 2007
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in European Journal of Social Theory
- Vol. 10 (4), 543-560
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431007084370
Abstract
The article appraises Habermas's recent writings on theology and social theory and their relevance to a new sociology of religion in the `post-secular society'. Beginning with Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Habermas revisits his earlier thesis of the `linguistification of the sacred', arguing for a `rescuing translation' of the traditional contents of religious language through pursuit of a via media between an overconfident project of modernizing secularization, on the one hand, and a fundamentalism of religious orthodoxies, on the other. Several questions, however, must be raised about this current project. How far can Habermas engage adequately with religious ideas of the absolute while still retaining certain broadly functionalist theoretical premises? Is the notion of an ongoing secularization process in the `post-secular society' a contradiction in terms? What appropriate `limits and boundaries' are to be accepted between the domains of knowledge and faith, and how strictly can they be drawn? How coherent is the notion of `methodological atheism', and how consistently can Habermas pursue the project of a `religious genealogy of reason'?This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- Habermas and TheologyPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2006
- Axial Civilizations and World HistoryPublished by Brill ,2004
- Versprachlichung des Sakralen? Zur religionsphilosophisehen Auseinandersetzung mit Jürgen Habermas' „Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns"Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie (AZP), 1987
- rationality and religion in habermas' recent work: some remarks on the relation between critical theory and the phenomenology of religionPhilosophy & Social Criticism, 1986
- The Critical Theory of Religion; The Frankfurt SchoolPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1985