Posts Tagged ‘post-secular’
March 22nd, 2011
posted by
Vincent P. Pecora
John Boy, in a post on March 15th, titled “What we talk about when we talk about the postsecular,” provides a brisk empirical overview of his key word’s appearance in recent discourse. But it is not at all what I talk about when I talk about the post-secular, and in many ways I think Boy’s account is rather wrong-headed.
Boy takes his cue from a lecture delivered by Jürgen Habermas in 2001, where Habermas proposes to bridge the gap posited by Ernst Bloch’s notion of non-synchronicity—which is simply an uncritical early version of Johannes Fabian’s “denial of coevalness,” in his Time and the Other—through “democratically enlightened common sense.” However, what this “common sense” means for Habermas—”a translation of religious positions” into (for example) “Kant’s postmetaphysical ethics”—is in no sense post-secular! It is in fact the essence of the secularization thesis itself, in one of its most prominent historical guises . . . .
Tags: Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, philosophy, post-secular, secularization, social theory
Posted in here & there | 13 Comments »
March 15th, 2011
posted by
John D. Boy
The term “postsecular” is quickly becoming a keyword for scholars of religion and public life. So what is it all about? An overview of its uses and meanings.
Tags: After secularization, Jürgen Habermas, literature, philosophy, post-secular, post-secularization, Radical Orthodoxy, Rethinking secularism, social theory, sociology, sociology of religion, theology
Posted in here & there | 6 Comments »
March 11th, 2011
posted by
Hussein Ali Agrama
Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these protests? The term “non-secular” is too easily confused with the notion of the religious. And unlike post-secularity, asecularity is not a temporal marker. It allows for the possibility that asecularity has, in different forms, always been with us, even from within the traditions from which state secularity arises. Explorations of post-secularity typically try to identify the emergence of new norms. Such attempts fail to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power. In contrast, the term asecularity specifies a situation not where norms are no longer secular, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are no longer seen as necessary.
Tags: international affairs, Middle East, North Africa, political theory, post-secular, protests, revolution, secularity, sovereignty, Talal Asad
Posted in Uprising in Egypt | 3 Comments »
February 25th, 2011
posted by
Daromir Rudnyckyj
For most of the second half of the twentieth century development was assumed to be consonant with modernity and its attendant practices: secularism, reason, and science. However, it is increasingly apparent that the secularity of development should no longer be taken for granted. This is visible not only in recent initiatives for “faith-based development,” but also in movements that seek to develop faith by emphasizing religious ethics conducive to economic rationality.
Tags: anthropology, capitalism, development, Islam, modernity, post-secular, secularism, Southeast Asia, spirituality
Posted in World affairs | 2 Comments »
December 10th, 2010
posted by
Nathan Schneider
Simon During is a professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland, having previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Melbourne, and elsewhere. In addition to editing The Cultural Studies Reader, now in its third edition, he is the author of several books, including Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard, 2002) and Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (Routledge, 2010). In both, he brings questions of the secular to bear on historical, literary sources both obscure and revelatory. His Compulsory Democracy: towards a literary history is forthcoming.
Tags: capitalism, Deathless questions, democracy, politics, post-secular, secularism
Posted in Interviews | 2 Comments »
November 3rd, 2010
posted by
Eduardo Mendieta
The centrality of religion to social theory in general and philosophy in particular explains why Jürgen Habermas has dealt with it, in both substantive and creative ways, in all of his work. Indeed, religion can be used as a lens through which to glimpse both the coherence and the transformation of his distinctive theories of social development and his rethinking of the philosophy of reason as a theory of social rationalization.
For Habermas, religion has been a continuous concern precisely because it is related to both the emergence of reason and the development of a public space of reason-giving. Religious ideas, according to Habermas, are never mere irrational speculation. Rather, they possess a form, a grammar or syntax, that unleashes rational insights, even arguments; they contain, not just specific semantic contents about God, but also a particular structure that catalyzes rational argumentation.
Tags: Jürgen Habermas, philosophy, post-secular
Posted in Religion in the public sphere | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2010
posted by
The Editors
Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 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.
Tags: Jürgen Habermas, philosophy, post-secular, social theory
Posted in books | No Comments »
August 6th, 2010
posted by
John D. Boy
Inside Higher Ed interviews Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, the editors of the recently-published volume After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. They highlight the experimental aspects of newer work in the philosophy of religion, which often means revisiting philosophers from the past two centuries and reading them anew in the wake of Deleuze.
Tags: books, Gilles Deleuze, philosophy, post-secular, postmodernism
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
August 5th, 2010
posted by
John D. Boy
In the newest issue of Theory, Culture & Society, British sociologist Gregor McLennan takes a closer look at the “postsecular turn” in contemporary social theory. He argues that this “turn”—if indeed it amounts to one—finds expression in three broad trends: genealogical critique, neo-vitalism, and postcolonial antihistoricism. He mainly discusses these trends with regard to the work of three scholars, each representing one of the trends: Talal Asad, William Connolly, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (though Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler are also mentioned, as representatives of neo-vitalism and antihistoricism, respectively). While these theoretical developments go some way in critiquing the problematic linkages between secular epistemology and political arrangements, McLennan argues that they are each riddled with inconsistencies. Rather than staking out an antisecular position, these perspectives remain within secularism, contributing to the “secularization of secularism.”
Tags: critical theory, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gregor Mclennan, Judith Butler, philosophy, post-colonialism, post-secular, Rethinking secularism, Rosi Braidotti, Talal Asad, vitalism, William Connolly
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
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