R. Scott Appleby’s The Ambivalence of the Sacred, Two Decades On: A Postsecular Reading for the Religious World of the 21^st Century?

Abstract

R. Scott Appleby as a scholar, teacher, institution-builder, and practitioner intervened in debates among scholars, politicians, policy makers, religious people, and all people of good will, grappling with the unexpectedly violent post-Cold War world. He offered what can be called a “postsecular” recognition not only of the global religious resurgence, but how taking seriously religion and religious traditions – piety, faith, theology, and hermeneutics – in debates over peace, violence, interreligious dialogue, reconciliation, and political engagement can provide clarity of understanding amidst the complexity of this new world, and also hope and a vision for the future.

Keywords:

• R. Scott Appleby
• D. H. Lawrence
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Dorothy L. Sayers
• sacred
• religion
• international relations

Notes

1 Waldemar Gurian, a Russian-born German-American political scientist who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, took up a professorship at the University of Notre Dame, where he founded The Review of Politics. Gurian’s home in South Bend became a salon for intellectual refugees: Hannah Arendt, Eric Voeglin, Leo Strauss, Jacques Maritain, Carl Friedrich, Hans Morgenthau, and many others. Morgenthau, in the Foreword to the first edition of Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau 1948), thanks Gurian for commenting on the manuscript. Gurian’s article, “On the Study of International Relations” (Gurian 1946), was cited by Brian C. Schmidt as part of his analysis of the early history and historiography of international relations (Schmidt 2002). Gurian and other scholars, Schmidt argues, grappled with the problem of synthesizing a set of largely autonomous fields of inquiry into international relations. However, Schmidt ignores Gurian’s call from the beginning for religion to be part of the study of international relations. See also Arendt (1955) on “The Personality of Waldemar Gurian.”

2 Notwithstanding the fact that the publisher’s publicity for The Ambivalence of the Sacred answered this question on the “About the author” page, and equated the Fundamentalist Project (1991–1995) with the “global religious resurgence” (429).

3 The Rio de la Plata school is also a response to what they see as the failure of Cuban-style state socialism and American-style capitalism and globalization. See Borghese 2018, chapter 5, “A World without Bonds: The Primacy of the Economy in the Era of Globalization,” 187–222.

4 Massimo Borghesi, who wrote The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey, Foreword by Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour (Borghese 2018), is also the author of a biography of Luigi Giussani, the founder of the lay international Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione (CL). Gilles Kepel (1994, 61–76) argued that CL has been one of the most successful grassroots movements promoting, especially in Europe, “re-Christianization from below,” and then, “re-Christianization ‘from above’.” I first reviewed Kepel’s book, The Revenge of God, in the journal Millennium. (Thomas 1995) However, interestingly, CL was included in The Fundamentalist Project, which raises this set of interpretive issues. See Zadra 1994.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott M. Thomas

Scott M Thomas is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of International Relations and the Politics of Developing Countries in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath. He is the author of The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (Palgrave 2005) and many other articles. He is a senior academic advisor to the Religion and International Relations Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), and is a contributing editor at The Review of Faith & International Affairs. He has engaged with many governments around the world on the role of religion in international affairs.