Jonathan VanAntwerpen & Craig Calhoun 
Habermas and Religion 

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently
made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both
religion’s prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its
potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas’s engagement
with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of
his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in
philosophy, politics and social theory.



Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of
progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple
trajectories of modernization in the contemporary world. He calls
attention to the contemporary significance of ‚postmetaphysical‘
thought and ‚postsecular‘ consciousness – even in Western societies
that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public
reason.



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 – itself a major statement from one
of today’s most important thinkers.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Abbreviations vii

Editors‘ Introduction 1

Part I Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities

1 Exploring the Postsecular: Three Meanings of ‚the
Secular‘ and Their Possible Transcendence 27

José Casanova

2 The Anxiety of Contingency: Religion in a Secular Age 49

María Herrera Líma

3 Is the Postsecular a Return to Political Theology? 72

María Pía Lara

4 An Engagement with Jurgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical
Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue 92

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Part 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‘ 115

Thomas Mc Carthy

6 Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too: Habermas’s
Genealogy of Postsecular Reason 132

Amy Allen

7 Forgetting Isaac: Faith and the Philosophical Impossibility of
a Postsecular Society 154

J. M. Bernstein

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

8 A Postsecular Global Order? The Pluralism of Forms of Life and
Communicative Freedom 179

James Bohman

9 Global Religion and the Postsecular Challenge 203

Hent de Vries

10 Religion and the Public Sphere: What are the Deliberative
Obligations of Democratic Citizenship? 230

Cristina Lafont

11 Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and
Democratic Legitimacy 249

Maeve Cooke

Part IV Translating Religion, Communicative Freedom, and
Solidarity

12 Sources of Morality in Habermas’s Recent Work on
Religion and Freedom 277

Matthias Fritsch

13 Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation:
Reflections on Memory Politics and the Postsecular 301

Max Pensky

14 What Lacks is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas
322

John Milbank

Reply to My Critics 347

Jürgen Habermas (Translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s Work 391

Eduardo Mendieta

Notes and References 408

Bibliography of Works by Jürgen Habermas 465

Index 471

Über den Autor

Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Eduardo Mendieta is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook.

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