What Does It Mean Ontologically to Be Religious (2018)

The Heythrop Journal, 2024

In this article, I argue that human meaning and value are grounded in an infinite horizon as opposed to the finite horizon of the building of a life. This infinite grounding of human meaning and value makes sense of and justifies the desire for everlasting life. I also argue that this infinite horizon can motivate an ethic of social justice better than the necessity of building a life within a finite timeframe could. In this article I take Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom as representative of the position that meaning and value can only be made sense of in light of the horizon of death; and I draw on phenomenologist Michel Henry's concept of Life and Jean-Luc Marion's concept of the saturated phenomenon to argue against that position. I then draw on Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and David Graeber to argue that social justice cannot be grounded in secular faith of temporal finitude but is rather best made sense of in view of an everlasting hope and a move to the infinite.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2002

This trilogy represents a high-water mark for comparative philosophy of religion. The basic premise of the project is simple: it brings tradition specialists in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese Religions together with generalists interested in ...

A tricky question lies behind the whole secularization debate. What will be of “secularity” after the supposed demise of its opponent? Will it still make sense to speak of the “secular” in the absence of a “transcendent” alternative? At first sight, it would seem more sensible to ask this question against the backdrop of historical scenarios such as Gauchet’s “la sortie de la religion”. The issue could then be settled by resorting to Wittgenstein’s famous metaphor of the ladder: we employ religion to dispose of religion just as we employ philosophy to “throw away” the ladder after climbing up on it. But what will the world look like after that? Many observers of the contemporary world apparently think that the endpoint will be an atmosphere of “widespread indifference” (Bruce). Yet, if one is inclined, as I am, to give more credit to Taylor’s view that religion is likely to preserve an “independent motivating force” also in the future, it makes sense to try to formulate hypotheses on how human religiosity will look like in the context of the new secular conditions of belief. And, a fortiori, it makes sense, more generally, to ask how these new religious expressions will help to extend and refine our understanding of the religieux on the whole. Taking cue from the current flourishing of initiatives and theories on “walking”, I will argue in my paper that the human “désire d’éternité” is likely to appear in the guise of an oversignification of ordinary practices. I propose, then, to see in this need to force the limits of ordinary life a resilient disposition to establish an intentional relationship with the totality of experience, yet without embracing or confronting it from an external “view-from-nowhere” standpoint.

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2019

The present article consists of four parts, and the first part examines the concept of life-world from the phenomenological perspective and argues that the characteristic features of the life-world would be through inspection, analysis and description of the life as we encounter it devoid of scientific explanations. The second part of the paper develops the idea that religion finds its meaning and significance only in the domain of life-world because the phenomena that one experiences in the religious acts take place primarily in a pre-theoretical way. Thus, it is argued that the operative dimension of phenomenology of religious consciousness involves a new understanding of subjectivity-a passive plane of subjectivity-whose locus is differently conceived by Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger. The third part of the paper draws attention to the religious phenomena whose intended structures and meanings go beyond mediation and suggests that symbols form a realm between objectively given things and subjectively intended meanings. In other words, religious symbols serve as indispensable mediating bridges. The final part of the paper proposes that religious experiences like all other experiences, though are rooted in life-world, yet it transcends its worldly contents.

2001

Religions, 2026

The sociology of religion, as a discipline, has traveled a long path since the predictions of the founding fathers of sociology to the complex reality of the 21st century. For much of modern history, the discipline was dominated by a "grand narrative" or grand récit of secularization. This narrative, whose intellectual origins trace back to Saint-Simon, Comte, and Spencer, possessed an undeniably teleological stamp: it was believed that the more modern a society became, the more secular and less religious it would be. Under this paradigm, it was assumed that the advancement of scientific rationality, the functional differentiation of social spheres, and technical progress would inevitably lead to the "disenchantment of the world" and the confinement of the religious to the private sphere, if not its total disappearance. However, contemporary empirical evidence and recent theoretical debates have fractured this consensus. As Aguiluz-Ibargüen and Beriain point out in this volume, that "sociological conjecture" which automatically associated modernization with religious decline has proven to be empirically false on a global level. Europe, far from being the universal norm prefiguring humanity's future, is revealed today as an "islet of secular exceptionality" in an ocean of religious persistence. The classical theory failed in attempting to apply itself as a global rule, ignoring, for instance, the religious vitality of the United States-a country both modern and deeply religious-or the dynamics of intramundane religions like Confucianism or Taoism, which never fit the Western tension between "this world" and "the other world". In this context, current sociology has moved toward a paradigm of "multiple modernities" and a "post-secular" understanding of reality. We no longer live in a world where the distinction between transcendence and immanence can be wiped clean. Rather, we find ourselves in what Charles Taylor has termed a "secular age," defined not by the absence of God, but by a shift in the conditions of belief: faith is no longer axiomatic; it is one option among others. In this immanent frame, where we operate etsi Deus non daretur ("as if God did not exist"), the religious does not disappear but transforms and relocates. In contrast to the teleology implicit in European secularism, which postulates a final conversion of the religious "they" into a post-religious "we," these two circles do not function as irreconcilably opposed or disjointed elements. Rather, they operate as two circles of sociality that must be carefully understood as possibilities that enter into relation, tension, and mutual interpenetration within each society. Although the general theory of secularization that emerged in Europe prematurely postulated the advent of a postdualist world, anchored exclusively in the flourishing of the secular immanent world, it is necessary to recognize that the immanent framework itself generates new experiences of

The present essay is a reflection on philosophical and theological foundations for, and interpretation of, a neglected intercultural dialogue between Protestant Christianity and Animism/Shamanism. David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensous (1997) develops an ecologically-minded defense of animism on the basis of Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. In his ecological critique of Christianity, Abram makes a case that Christianity has robbed nature of her sacredness and spiritual relevancy, and confined spirituality within the social space of the Church and a narrowly defined orthodox doctrine. Such spirituality entails a flight from our mortal, bodily nature which is intextricable from the rest of nature, claims Abram, and argues that Western destructivity towards the environment and non-human animals is a consequence of the Christian fixation on the written word of its founding text, anthropocentric view of spirituality, and Platonist reification of ideas set in a vertical opposition to the less valued, material/sensual world. While conceding that contemporary Christianity can not but acknowledge the validity of some of the central points of this ecophenomenological critique, there are powerful resources in Christian tradition that can rise to the challenge. One such is Friedrich Schleiermacher's philosophy of 'religious feelings', which I interpret in conversation with Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Schleiermacher argues that the common feature of religious feelings is a fact that in them, human beings can experience a communion with the universe, or with 'all' – either through/with their social or natural environment. A healthy faith in God is related, for Schleiermacher, to such deep, phenomenologically non-intentional aspects of being-in-the-world. Despite great theological and cultural differences between Christianity and animism, a progressive-Protestant understanding of Christian spirituality shares with animism at least one important wisdom: it is ethically and religiously/spiritually significant that we humans are related to our environment on a depth-phenomenological level.

Contemporary Pragmatism, 2020

In his insightful essay »Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization« Cornel West fervently addressed a question of our abilities to imagine a more empa-thetic, more compassionate, and also more hospitable world, in which we could foresee , or perhaps already lay ground for a future community where the word religion would simply mean that we live our lives in the consciousness of our finitude and thus in an existential and cognitive humility. This kind of religion (not far from Dewey's or Rorty's ideals) would enable us to see beyond the margins of any narrow-minded religious ideology or any violent incarnation of religion. Based on these initial thoughts, we first wish to discuss two basic concepts of contemporary political theology-community and vulnerability. We shall argue that we need to offer in contemporary political theology a basic ethico-democratic response, infused with our imaginative capacity for remembrance (Benjamin, Metz) and future hope (West, Dewey, Unger). We will argue with Unger (The Religion of the Future) that we need to live through accepting an enhanced vulnerability, being shared in our democratic (and) religious communities. From this view any loss of human life and its potentials is a sign of a grave injustice, and a catastrophe from an ethical point of view. Finally, we will propose the so called reverse thesis on religion-namely that today, perhaps, we should first look at religion in its radicalized ethico-political form which only later enables us to think about its various variations and incarnations within different traditions and cultures. We will argue that it is within this newly acquired tem-porality of religion and its inherent ontologico-political paradox, that it is possible to imagine a future place where recurrent hope for a life is reborn and nurtured within future pluralistic / inclusivistic / democratic / post-Christian communities, based on compassion and shared vulnerability, and not any more on power, or any other form of violence.

MDPI Religions, 2025

Early post-Vatican Catholic moral theologians made significant global proposals for renewed theological ethics in their own time and culture. However, after the culmination of the work of these great scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, Catholic moral theology became anchored in contingent polemic and polarized debates. It ceased to offer integral proposals of fundamental Christian ethics for the new challenges in the personal, intersubjective, and social scenarios. Subsequent studies often focused on bioethics, sexuality, family, and social justice but rarely attempted to renew a public fundamental morality for the 21st century. The essential features of this article are the proposal of new categories and debates for fundamental moral theology, grounded on the conviction that promoting this discipline as a humanization proposal builds on the profound potential human beings are called to fulfill. Humanity understood in all its complexity requires a theological ethics capable of incorporating this human condition and its categories, such as vulnerability, corporality, and recognition from a transdisciplinary point of view. These challenges underscore the urgent need for a renewed ethical framework articulated in a significant language for our time. Drawing on extensive literature and analytical research methods, it examines the interplay between these multifaceted issues.