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8 - What lacks is feeling: mediating reason and religion today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Gavin D'Costa
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Malcolm Evans
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Tariq Modood
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Julian Rivers
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Summary

Plant’s contribution to this volume raises a question about the nature of religion in public discourse, especially in the context of a post-metaphysical philosophy. In this chapter I will ask whether Habermas (and inevitably Kant) can be questioned about the very presuppositions that guide the framing of such a question.

Was fehlt?, asks Jürgen Habermas in the course of his now famous debate about post-secularity, faith and reason with the Munich Jesuits (Habermas et al., 2010). What lacks to us today, in an age supposedly governed by reason? Here Habermas takes up the post-religious lament of Brecht and Adorno: how do we supply the role that religion once fulfilled?

But he takes it up in a very different key, because he is newly aware, in the early twenty-first century that, far from going away, religion is if anything returning – in terms of numbers in the Third World, and in terms of public influence in the West. This return is by no means always benign: religious extremism is returning also. Yet in a new combination, secular extremism has reached a new pitch of intensity and we are also seeing the rise of an increasingly militant naturalism. Both these phenomena Habermas understandably regards as threatening to a reasonable humanism. In the face of this threat he wishes to defend and refortify its neutral, secular ground. However, he continues to be haunted by the Brechtian lack. And in the face of this lack he no longer suggests merely a novel substitute for lost faith, but rather that reason must continue to draw upon faith’s resources. Religion is not going to go away and we need not only reasonable forms of religion but also a rational respect for faith if human beings and the planet are to have a sane future.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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