"Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies he developed a project to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became (...) frustrated by the West and converted to Islam in 1982, ending his life discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world"--. (shrink)

In his recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has stressed the need for a dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. This dialogue should focus on the translation of religious traditions into rational, secular forms. In his more recent work on the social function of rituals, however, he rejected the Durkheimian view of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this article (...) I discuss Habermas’s early reflections on postsecularism and assess his interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then propose an alternative to his translation proviso whereby religious symbolic content would be translated into behavior-regulating technologies aimed at developing the dispositional resources needed for a continuous postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 455-468.

In recent years, the intellectual tide has moved strongly against the kind of secular thinking that characterized Gellner’s work. Whether couched in terms of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, genealogy, global understanding, political theology, or the revival of normative, metaphysical and openly religious perspectives, today’s postsecular and even anti-secular mood in social theory seems to consign Gellner’s project to the dustbin of history: a stern but doomed attempt to shore up western liberal rationalism. Under some revisionary lights, it has even become pointless to (...) distinguish flexible secular thinking which still retains some firm ‘bottom lines’ from what is routinely portrayed as rampant ideological secularism. Unconvinced by key assumptions and motivations on this terrain, I reactivate Gellner’s essential concerns and propositions around secularity and secularism, feeding these into the current debates. Whilst Gellner’s stringent, unrivalled exposure of intellectual cant continues to be hugely valuable, and his sense of the utter historicity of social life and thought indispensable, Gellner’s critical positivism could not, by his own admission, produce a coherent cultural politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLeo Strauss argues that the “theologico-political” problem arose from the competing claims of rationalist philosophy and theology. Although he urges others to take sides in this debate, most theorists see it as insoluble, since it is rooted in competing traditions and different, non-demonstrable, epistemic principles. Strauss, however, argues that there is a common ground capable of sustaining a contest between the two: their appeal to the pre-philosophic understanding of justice as moral virtue. The contest between the Bible and Socratic-Platonic philosophy (...) centers on which of the two better understands what justice is, what completes it, and in what respect it is good. Strauss enables us to see why Plato’s Socratic dialogues became indispensable models for classical and medieval philosophers who sought to meet the challenge of theology on the vital common ground of philosophy and theology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates Habermas's communicative ethic in relation to changes in the roles of institutions and the state. I reference Alexy, Weber and Taylor, arguing that an artificial delimitation of the public sphere as disparate from the private or religious cramps the capacity of those identified as outsiders to communicate within it. I question the ability of public reason as Habermas has outlined it to meet the challenges it faces regarding interreligious dialogue and integration in democratic societies, and I suggest, (...) instead, an approach more open to dialogue with religions in terms that are more comprehensible to them. (shrink)