Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
The Manifesto develops further the Critical Theory of Religion intrinsic to the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School into a new paradigm of the Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Theology of Religion. Its central theme is the theodicy problem in the context of late capitalist society and its globalization.
This book contains the work of international scholars who address the contemporary globalizing antagonism between religion and secularity, in the theoretical and practical pursuit for this antagonism's reconciliation in a more just, humane and peaceful future society and world.
Critical Theory: The Basics brings clarity to a topic that is confusingly bandied about with various meanings today in popular and academic culture. First defined by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s, “critical theory” now extends far beyond its original German context around the Frankfurt School and the emergence of Nazism. We now often speak of critical theories of race, gender, anti-colonialism, and so forth. This book introduces especially the core program of the first-generation of the Frankfurt School (including Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse), and shows how this program remains crucial to understanding the problems, ideologies, and systems of the modern world, including capitalism, racism, sexism, and the enduring problems of colonialism. It explores basic questions like: What is critical theory? What can critical theory be? What should it be? Why and how does critical theory remain vital to understanding the contemporary world, including notions of self, society, politics, art, religion, culture, race, gender, and class? With suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking an accessible but robust introduction to the richness and complexity of this tradition and to its continuing importance today.
What are the implications of adopting a primacy of praxis position in feminist theology? How can we respect the diversity of women's experience while retaining it as a useful analytic category? Do these twin resources of women's experience and praxis together imply that feminist theology is ultimately relativist? Through an analysis of the work of some of today's key feminist theologians – Christian, womanist and post-Christian – Linda Hogan considers these and other methodological questions.
Where will postmodern culture lead us in the twenty-first century? Will it destroy traditional cultures together with the old, established religions that were its foundation? These questions and the new concerns they evoke are explored in this important collection of original essays. Contributors challenge entrenched assumptions about what many social scientists consider irreversible cultural trends. These include cultural differentiation, emphasis on individual identity, movement toward religion as a private act rather than a community commitment, and above all, emphasis on the relativity of all knowledge and values.The volume asserts three lines of argument in opposition to these trends. The first is the teleological significance of traditional religions and archaic knowledge. History can be said to have no goal, but the same must not follow for human culture. One can conceive individually of a hundred goals to live for. However, the quality of life cannot be that diverse. Taken to the extreme, cultural particularity and philosophical nihilism are insults to the life that emerged on our planet eons ago. Second, this volume emphasizes moral concern and the importance of universal values. Ideas of human well being have been formulated from ancient times. Religious beliefs invariably contain statements of value in the form of commandments and exhortations that express fundamental goals for a quality of life. Third, the nature of religion and spirituality is discussed. Religion today has become controversial socially, and marginal sociologically. The role of religion in society is sometimes problematic or abused, but it is also underestimated and misunderstood. The authors suggest that contemporary religion might best be viewed as non-ideological spiritual culture. This, in turn, looks to a future in which religion and culture coalesce.This volume includes an international cast of scholars from Japan, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, and Belgium. All have engaged in research outside their own countries. Taken as a whole, this volume addresses issues of interest to those in the fields of futures studies, religion, and philosophy, and in particular those concerned with human agency, personal responsibility, and public choice.
Du Bois's Dialectics is doubly distinguished from other books on Du Bois because it is the first extended exploration of Du Bois's contributions to new critical theory and the first book-length treatment of his contributions to contemporary black radical politics and the developing discipline of Africana Studies. With chapters that undertake ideological critiques of education, religion, the politics of reparations, and the problematics of black radical politics in contemporary culture and society, Du Bois's Dialectics employs Du Bois as its critical theoretical point of departure and demonstrates his (and Africana Studies') contributions to, as well as contemporary critical theory's connections to, critical pedagogy, sociology of religion, and reparations theory. Rabaka offers the first critical theoretical treatment of the W. E. B. Du Bois_Booker T. Washington debate, which lucidly highlights Du Bois's transition from a bourgeois black liberal to a black radical and revolutionary democratic socialist. This book is primarily directed at scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students working in and associated with Africana Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Studies.
This comprehensive introduction to the thought of Jurgen Habermas covers the full range of his ideas from his early work on student politics to his recent work on communicative action, ethics and law. Andrew Edgar examines Habermas' key texts in chronological order, revealing the developments, shifts and turns in Habermas' thinking as he refines his basic insights and incorporates new sources and ideas. Some of the themes discussed include Habermas' early reshaping of Marxist theory and practice, his characterization of critical theory, his conception of universal pragmatics, his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics, and his defence of the project of modernity. Edgar offers much more than a schematic run through of Habermas' big ideas. He deals in detail with Habermas' arguments in order to demonstrate how he weaves together multiple strands of thought, and he usefully situates Habermas' ideas within the contexts of the history of German philosophy, the history of sociology, and within contemporary debates in both continental and analytic philosophy. By engaging with some of Habermas' key critics and contrasting his views with the ideas of contemporaries, Edgar is able to give a clear sense of Habermas' place and importance in contemporary philosophy and social theory.
