This article is based on a paper given in December 2013 at a German–Italian workshop on Jürgen Habermas’ theory. Massimo Rosati had been studying Jürgen Habermas’ thought and classical sociology in the Durkheimian tradition for years. Because of his own Durkheimian reading of communicative action, he had been unsurprised when Habermas began to write systematically on religion. In this article, he addresses the new post-secular sensitivity to the remnants of mimetic and mythic worldviews within theoretical ones and discusses the sacred (...) as a universal historical structure of human consciousness. (shrink)