At 86, Jürgen Habermas remains one of the most influential living social philosophers in the world. Since the 9/11 attacks, he has focused on the problem of religion in the public sphere and helped to popularize the term ‘post‐secularism’. Despite this recent shift in his work, religion has always been a theme in his complex critical theory. In this paper, I trace the ways in which Habermas has situated religion over the span of his career, including significant shifts, and the ways in which his theory has been taken up by others. In conclusion, I point toward some directions for future engagement with his work in the study of religions.

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.

Matt Sheedy (U. of Manitoba) and Nathan Rein (Ursinus Coll.) interview Donovan O. Schaefer (Trinity Coll., Oxon.) about his 2015 book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power.

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