Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Theological Research: A Journal of Systematic Theology

Abstract

The relationship between religious faith and public reason has occupied an increasingly central role in Jürgen Habermas’s mature work. Yet this recent engagement with questions of religious meaning also illuminates a significant area of development in Habermas’s thought. While his earlier writings emphasized a need to subordinate religious beliefs to rational critique and to translate religious truth claims into publicly accessible forms of reasoning, his later writings signal a shift to a more cooperative understanding of religious faith and critical reason that highlights the ongoing potential of religion to advance rational discourse and social criticism in the public sphere. This essay traces this growing recognition of the irreducibility of religious meaning in Habermas’s writings, and it attends to the non-translatable dimension of religious faith as a source of its ongoing contemporary significance.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.15633/thr.2370

Volume

4

Publication Date

2016

Keywords

Habermas, faith and reason, religion in the public sphere, secularism, Frankfurt School, critical theory, communicative action, hermeneutics, theological method

Disciplines

Religion

ISSN

2353-7078

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