Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
Summary
Shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, Jürgen Habermas was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers. In his acceptance speech, he chose to address the role of religion in secular society. Unlike many others, Habermas does not simply cast the tenets of the enlightenment, the age of reason, as antidotes to religiously motivated violence. rather, Habermas declared that the process of secularization remained incomplete, and he characterized contemporary Western society as postsecular. In his conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, Habermas further explored this topic. He is curious about the prepolitical sources that feed democratic orders and about the “contributions in a religious language to public debates.” In other words, Habermas wonders about the relation between reason and religion in general and religion and politics in particular. Although he acknowledges the roots of these discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neither his acceptance speech nor the conversations explore these roots in detail. This volume seeks to address this gap from a cultural and historical perspective. It is the goal of this edited collection to offer new perspectives on the relation between religion and reason as it evolved in the era of the German enlightenment.
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- Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013