Sjoerd Griffioen investigates the polemics between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt in the German secularization debate (1950’s-1980’s). ‘Secularization’ is revealed as a contested concept in ideological struggles over modernity and religion, both in this debate and contemporary postsecularism.

In the wake of various secularization processes, a growing number of people in Western societies are now describing themselves as “non-religious.” But what does this sociological fact really mean, for the Church and for society at large? Has human religiosity a future after secularization? It does, this book argues, but in a radically altered form. Taking its cue from Pope Francis’s suggestion that globalizing humanity is presently living through a genuine “epochal shift,” this book presents an original analysis of the transformative effect of secularization on our spiritual predicament in the Western, now definitively post-Christian, world. Instead of succumbing to the all-too-common polarizations in contemporary religious discourse, this book aspires to overcome the “religious” vs. “secular” dichotomy through developing the logic of “Radical Secularization,” arguably the genuine novelty of the particularly Western process of secularization. The past homogeneously religious culture is certainly dusking, but this only paves the way for the dawn of the future and radically open horizon for our human search for meaning. This challenging book will offer intellectual impulses and spiritual incentives to everybody who ponders the future of human religious evolution after secularization.

In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.' This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of God at work everywhere. Indeed, many suppose that 'belief in the supernatural' is likewise fundamental nowadays to religious commitment. But dichotomising between 'naturalism' and 'supernaturalism' is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, just as the notion of 'belief' emerged historically late. In this masterful contribution to intellectual history, the author overturns crucial misconceptions – 'myths' – about secular modernity, challenging common misunderstandings of the past even as he reinvigorates religious thinking in the present.

Red Secularism is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early feminists. Todd H. Weir shows how generations of secularist intellectuals staked out leading positions in the Social Democratic Party, but often lost them due to their penchant for dissent. Moving between local and national developments, this book examines the crucial role of red secularism in the political struggles over religion that rocked Germany and fed into the National Socialist dictatorship of 1933. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Presents a historical and philosophical overview of the twentieth-century German debates on secularization, and their significance for contemporary discussions about the relationship between theology and modernity. While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous ways, these strategies all developed “genealogies of the secular” by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt’s writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. “What makes the book so valuable pedagogically is the clarity and scope of its synthetic gestures about the dense questions congealing around the topic of secularization. It offers a pronouncement of central significance, emerging from some of the most important contemporary voices in these fields. The scholarship is internationally informed and engaged, even as it feels vibrant, immediate, and agenda setting.” — Ward Blanton, University of Kent, Canterbury

For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life—and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

This book examines the post-secular idea of ‘religion for non-believers’. The new form of unbelief which is dubbed as ‘tourist atheism’ is not based on absolute rejection of religion as a ‘dangerous illusion’ or ‘mere prejudice’. Tourist atheists instead consider religion as a cultural heritage and a way of seeking perfection. What are the origins of these new forms of atheism? What are the implications of the emergence of a type of atheism which is more open toward religious teachings, rituals, arts, and world views? Hashemi argues that public intellectuals must consider that it is a sign of a post-secular age in which believers and non-believers go beyond mere tolerance and engage in a creative process of co-practice and co-working.