ABSTRACT
The ‘collapse of the great secular ideologies’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has left religion as a primary venue for the inculcation of meaning within diverse populations worldwide. The languages of belonging, of meaning, of definitions of good and of the summum bonum, are also always the languages of different religious traditions, beliefs and practices. The increasing religious illiteracy in contemporary Europe is thus of grave political consequence as journalists seek to measure up to the rapidly changing societies they inhabit. Max Muller, the nineteenth-century doyen of religious studies, famously remarked about the study of religion that ‘He who knows one, knows none’. Within the western religious tradition, otherness was apotheosized in the logos of a personal Creator God. For the particularism of primordially defined civic identities is of a very different nature than the particular languages of transcendent religions whose very engagement with the universal dimension of existence imposes obligations not otherwise apprehended or accepted.
