No abstract

This article investigates the plausibility of using studies of imaginative play to illuminate and explain the contemporary prevalence and popularity of religious imaginai dialogue. Emphasis is given to conceptual considerations arising from the application of recent findings in the neuroscience of social cognition and cognitive theories of childhood development to the study of religion.

In Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age Hans Kippenberg argues that the history of religions is the creative work-product of a cultural and political identity crisis, one in which the comparative history of religions became a means for some European scholars to uncouple from an increasingly halfhearted attachment to Christianity and re-experience their own history in a dynamic new form. A future for religion was thus found in the creation of innovative categories for the re-imagining of the past. For this reason Kippenberg rightly posits that the early scholars of religion are best read as “classical theorists of a modern age in which past religion still has a future” (xvi). We argue that the influential critical social theorist Jürgen Habermas, one of the most vocal proponents of the unfinished project of Enlightenment and the conceptual architect of postmetaphysical thinking, has much in common with these early scholars of religion.

The aim of the essay is to provide an introductory analysis of the potentially negative effects of religious or spiritual narratives invoked or encouraged when death is near. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Jessica Benjamin, I argue that the encouragement of the unchecked expression of feelings coupled with the view that all individuals are sacred and have a sacred story promotes a potentially inhibited and inhibiting thanatological discourse. Instead of encouraging the inclusion of “spirituality” as a preferential discourse for dealing with death, dying, and bereavement, it is argued here that such encouragement may inadvertently have a disabling effect for those immediately involved in the process of dying (family and professional health care workers) and, at the same time, contribute to a social mystification or spiritualized understanding of death.

This article argues for a rethinking of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of religion. Taking into consideration some of Habermas’s recent writings on the topic, it is argued that his conception of religion is untenable. Recent critical studies on the discourse of religion and its historical context have rendered the classic conception of religion suspect. Instead of describing a unique sphere of life, religion can and should be redescribed as something ordinary, embedded, and conceptually inseparable from a larger array of social imaginary institutions and networks.