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Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God’s goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God’s sovereignty with God’s love.

The Hidden God revisits the origins of American pragmatism and finds a nascent “posthumanist” critique shaping early modern thought. By reaching as far back as the Calvinist arguments of the American Puritans and their struggle to know a “hidden God,” this book brings American pragmatism closer to contemporary critical theory. Ryan White reads the writings of key American philosophers, including Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, against modern theoretical works by Niklas Luhmann, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Sharon Cameron, Cary Wolfe, and Gregory Bateson. This juxtaposition isolates the distinctly posthumanist form of pragmatism that began to arise in these early texts, challenging the accepted genealogy of pragmatic discourse and common definitions of posthumanist critique. Its rigorously theoretical perspective has wide implications for humanities research, enriching investigations into literature, history, politics, and art.

This book targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and explores the radical potential of Christ, whose “crossing” disrupts their circular discourse. It is built upon the idea of “nonphilosophy,” or “nonstandard philosophy.” This is a way of thinking that goes past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations among religion, science, politics, and art. The book describes a Christ who is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles or the Catholic Church. Instead He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. The book inserts quantum science into religion and recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so that equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, the book is a heretical experiment that ties religion tightly to the human experience and the lived world.

This book encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between the “secular” and the “religious” to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. It argues that the artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical “academic study of religion” and an ideological and authoritarian “religion” only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, the book calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of “encounter” and “response,” illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. The book argues that the act of responding to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds. It recommends that scholars must confront the questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. The book refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings, as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources that religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. The book concludes that, in humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, the book explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. Secularization means three things: the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action—that is, through the emergence of new concepts. The book shows that these actions radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena.

This book looks at the conflict between two very different understandings of identity: the more traditional view that an identity carries with it certain duties and obligations, and an opposing view in which there can be no rationally compelling move from statements of fact to “judgments of value.” According to this second view, individuals must take responsibility for determining their own values and obligations. The book illustrates through personal experience the practical implications of this characteristically philosophical debate. It finally settles on the following answer: both the “traditional” assumption that individuals must recognize certain values and obligations, and the contrary view that individuals are ultimately responsible for determining their own values, are deeply embedded in differing conceptions of society and its relation to its members. The book also examines the misunderstandings between those for whom identity constitutes a conceptual bridge connecting the facts of who and what a person may be to the value commitments incumbent upon them, and those for whom the very idea of such a bridge can be nothing but a confusion. Using key examples from the notoriously vexed case of Jewish identity, the book depicts the practical significance of the differences between these worldviews, particularly for those who have to negotiate them.