“Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?” Judith Butler recently asked. Here I will explore these…
Fighting words that are not fought
Religion in the public sphere
Scholars reassess a longstanding debate regarding the expression and interdiction of religion in the public sphere.
Religion’s many powers
To say that religion has power in the public sphere is not to say that it can be easily absorbed…
Religion as a catalyst of rationalization
The centrality of religion to social theory in general and philosophy in particular explains why Jürgen Habermas has dealt with…
An empirical perspective on religious and secular reasons
This “religion in the public sphere” thread has featured debates about whether citizens of liberal democratic societies can offer religious…
Translation and transformation
In my last post, I closed with two questions relating to Jurgen Habermas's recent work on religion and the public sphere:…
Nothing special about religion
It is clear from the ongoing discussion about "Religion in the public sphere" that we live in an age when…
“Recognizing” religion
Religion appears in liberal theory first and foremost as an occasion for tolerance and neutrality. This orientation is reinforced by…
An ideal of conscientious engagement
Many political theorists, pundits and even presidential candidates have advocated some variation on the claim that religious and secular reasons…
Taking religion seriously
What distinguishes Habermas from Rawls on religion in the public sphere is not Habermas’s slightly amended view of public reason,…
Religious reasons & secular revelations
That Jürgen Habermas and I probably agree on most fundamental issues does not mean that there are no differences between…