ABSTRACT
The old assumption that modernization leads to secularization is outdated. Yet the certainty that religion is an anthropological universal that can only be suppressed by governments is also dead. Thus it is now a favorable moment for a new perspective on religion. This book takes human experiences of self-transcendence as its point of departure. Religious faith is seen as an attempt to articulate and interpret such experiences. Faith then is neither useful nor a symptom of weakness or misery, but an opening up of ways of experience. This book develops this basic idea, contrasts it with the thinking of some leading religious thinkers of our time, and relates it to the current debates about human rights and universal human dignity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |48 pages
Religious Experience
chapter |17 pages
Do We Need Religion?
chapter |15 pages
Religion in the Age of Contingency
chapter |12 pages
On the Articulation of Experience
part |63 pages
Between Theology and Social Science
chapter |14 pages
Sociology and the Sacred: Key Texts in the Sociology of Religion
chapter |16 pages
Sophisticated Fundamentalism from the Left? On John Milbank
chapter |13 pages
God in France: Paul Ricoeur As Theoretical Mediator
chapter |7 pages
Post-Secular Religion? On Jürgen Habermas
part |35 pages
Human Dignity