The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks

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Notes

1. Veit Bader, “Post-secularism or Liberal-Democratic constitutionalism?” Erasmus Law Review 5.1 (2012): 5–26.

2. Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

3. John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001).

4. See, for instance, Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). One may object to considering Vattimo under the heading of post-secularism for two reasons: first, he does not use the term himself, and, second, and more importantly, for him secularization is the result of the development of a Christian “logic.” From this perspective, the Age of Interpretation is part of the process of secularization. While this is true, the advent of the Age of Interpretation marks a crucial shift within the dynamic of secularization as it breaks away from the different versions of secular “absolutes” (e.g., in politics, Stalinist communism and French laicism; in epistemology, naturalism and realism) as well as breaking with a rigid opposition between faith and reason.

5. In recent times, Slavoj Žižek provides the most polemic “grand narrative” centred on the Judeo-Christian paradigm and its “world-historic” relevance. Žižek privileges Christianity as anticipating the communist revolution and combines it with the often crude dismissal of other spiritual-religious orientations, in particular Eastern ones. See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), especially the chapter “When East Meets West,” 12–33.

6. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics

Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

7. Damon Smith, “Bruno Dumont, ‘Hadewijch’,” Filmmaker, at: http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2010/12/bruno-dumont-hadewijch/(accessed 31 October 2014).

8. Ferran Requejo and Camil Ungureanu, eds., Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe (London: Routledge, 2014).

9. Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Maeve Cooke, “A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion,” Constellations 14.2 (2007): 224–38.

10. Dworkin, Religion without God, 29.

11. Alessandro Ferrara, The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Ferrara’s reflections on transcendence and political philosophy in this Special Issue.

12. Rohit Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 637–55.

13. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Andjar (London: Routledge, 2002).