What is most startling is his simultaneous assertion of the need for and right of religious discourse in the public sphere, and his criticism of the insufficient use of reason in the public sphere by the secular realm because of its refusal to grant validity to the religious perspective. Habermas the atheist is proposing no less than a revised concept of citizenship that simultaneously restores freedom of religious speech and reasoning to the public square and elevates the level of secular reasoning, with an equal duty of respect, listening, and reciprocity expected of all citizens. That is stunning in light of classical Enlightenment and Liberal thought – and very hopeful, coming from such a prominent and respected secular atheist.
In 2004 Habermas had a very interesting debate with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in which they were more in agreement than disagreement on issues. The second half of my paper discusses the debate.
The paper in it's entirety (edited for this blog) is below. I apologize for some funky formatting you may discover; Typepad does not translate Word documents well. Enjoy - if you can get all the way through it!
HABERMAS: A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind on Religion in the Public Sphere
Introduction
In the graduate program that I am studying in, we have been considering through the study of history how to rebuild the civilization of love in our times. The task is difficult, but in researching and thinking about the question this term, I came across a philosophical development in a surprising quarter of contemporary culture, which may prove hopeful for the future: a fermenting of new ideas in the point of contact between religion and the secular culture of Europe.
Contemporary culture in Europe, though it has tried, has never quite shaken off its Christian past, and some secular thinkers are beginning to realize that the Christian past cannot be shaken off without shaking off, and possibly destroying, culture itself – and so are re-examining the role of religion in public. The core ideals of the culture, today framed in liberal secular terms, are rooted in Christianity. Without such rootedness, some secular thinkers are beginning to realize that they are being lost, to the detriment of the culture itself.
In consequence, a new thinking on the role of religion in the public sphere is beginning to emerge, led by the prominent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a secular atheist, who is proposing a new model for citizenship and the church-state relationship in culture.
A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind
Jürgen Habermas, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, is considered one of the most prominent and influential philosophers of Europe, and is an avowed liberal secular atheist. Described as “a sovereign judge of what is true and what is not, of what is right and what is wrong . . . [the] supreme judge in matters of democratic, progressive, cosmopolitan, and secular constitutionalism,”[1] he is a towering academic figure who designed the system which became the foundation of social democracy in Germany and Europe. Born in 1929, he is a close contemporary of Pope Benedict XVI, grew up in Nazi Germany and was a Hitler Youth, but had an awakening during the Nuremburg trials in which he began to ask questions about “civil rights, democracy, and open discourse.”[2]
Habermas has spent most of his career arguing against the use of “religiously informed moral argument” in the public sphere,[3] but recently has radically revised his thinking. He has become convinced that the ideals of the secular state – of the basic goodness, dignity, and equality of human beings – are derived from Christianity, without which the ideals are being lost. This loss is evidenced in Western culture in violent 20th century wars, increasing moral decadence, and the rising threat of bioengineering. It is also evidenced in the growing clash between the secular West and more traditional, religious cultures, especially Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, and the growing Christianity of the Global South.[4]
Habermas first went public with his ideas on Oct. 14, 2001, in an acceptance speech for the Peace Prize awarded him by the German book industry. In it, he identified the legal concept of “secularization” as originating in the “forced transference of Church properties to the authority of the secular State.” [5] It later influenced attitudes of the modern age as a whole by setting up an adversarial relationship between religion and secularity, based on the assumption that religion would die away in the face of what was thought to be superior secular rationality.
However, this has not happened, and Habermas, in studying the growing clash in culture between religion and secularity, has concluded that not only has religion not gone away, but it is growing. Furthermore, and most importantly, religious reasoning has much to offer culture that secular reasoning cannot, and so must be taken into consideration in public discourse.
[1] Virgil Nemoianu, “The Church and the Secular Establishment: A Philosophical Dialog between Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 20, 22 [journal online]; Internet; available from http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/logos/volumes/9-2/9-2%20Article.pdf; accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[2] Peter Rowe, “Spotlight on Public Role of Religion,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 March 2005 [newspaper online], available from http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050303/news_lz1c3role.html; Internet; accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[3] Christa Case, “Germans Reconsider Religion,” Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 15,
2006 [newspaper online]; available from http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0915/p01s01-woeu.html;
Internet; accessed Nov. 6, 2006.
[4] Cf.
Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Rethinking the Role of Religion in Changing Public Spheres:
Some Comparative Perspectives,” Brigham
Young University Law Review 2005, no. 3 [journal online]; Internet; available
from http://lawreview.byu.edu/archives/2005/3/5HACKETT.FIN.pdf;
accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[5] Jurgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” Oct. 14, 2001 [speech online]; Internet; available from http://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/Habermas_Faith_and_knowledge_ev07-4_en.htm; accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
_________________________________________________
In a paper last term, I identified a term I had not heard before: “post-Protestant,” which some Emerging Church Christians are using to identify themselves, a term I find hopeful and a real milestone in thought since the Protestant Reformation. Researching for this term, I have come across another hopeful “post”: that of “post-secularism.” Klaus Eder, Professor of Sociology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has defined it as the “return of religion to the public sphere.”[1] Explaining the phenomenon as it is happening in Europe, he says:
During secularization, religion did not disappear tout court. It simply disappeared from the public sphere . . . having become a private matter. Today religion is returning to the public sphere. I define this return of religion in the public sphere as "post-secularism.”[2]
Virgil Nemoianu, Professor of Literature and Philosophy at Catholic University of America, has noted that the various usages of the term have in common “a denial of the ideologized claims of purely rationalistic science and a refusal to keep science on [a] pedestal, as a supreme and unshakeable expression of truth against any other type of discourse.”[3] Habermas used the term in his speech to the German book fair, and it underscores the cultural reality that he is attempting to deal with philosophically:
Secularization [is regarded] as being a . . . game between [capitalistic] science and technology on the one hand, and the conservative forces of religion and the Church on the other. This image does not fit in with a postsecular society that is adapting to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secular environment.[4]
In other words, “post-secular” means religion is re-emerging publicly and re-asserting its claim as a possible source of truth alongside science. Nemoianu summarized the speech thus:
He specifically demanded that the “public sphere” should make room for religious discourses. . . . Habermas rejected the transformation of science into an “alternative faith” . . . and he broadly requested the constitution of some “synergies” between the religious and the secular, which might be in a position to rein in modernity in ways in which a purely informational or media-driven society would not be able to achieve.[5]
Habermas, the secular atheist and designer of social democracy, believes we are now living in a post-secular society, and sees a need to “rein in modernity” due to its internal weaknesses caused by the false contradiction between religion and rationality. He has continued to speak and develop his thought on the subject, releasing Religion and Rationality[6] in 2002 and Time of Transitions in 2004, published in English in March 2006.[7]
This second book has begun to capture the attention of US media where, though studied in universities, he is virtually unknown. I found the quotation used in the following article repeated in several US outlets:
A professed secularist who has spent nearly half a century arguing against religiously informed moral argument, he made some arresting statements in his 2004 essay, "A Time of Transitions."
"Christianity, and nothing else," he wrote, "is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."[8]
Just a few months ago, the European Journal of Philosophy in its Spring 2006 edition featured as its lead article a chapter from Habermas’ newest book, Between Naturalism and Religion (not yet released), entitled “Religion in the Public Sphere,”[9] which summarizes much of his current thought on the subject. EJP subsequently offered the article free on the Internet, and in doing research for this paper, I found it being featured for download across a spectrum of US academic, philosophy, and law websites, and being discussed widely in related blogospheres.
What is most startling about the article, especially in light of the reading we’ve been doing in class, is Habermas’ simultaneous assertion of the need for and right of religious discourse in the public sphere, and his criticism of the insufficient use of reason in the public sphere by the secular realm because of its refusal to grant validity to the religious perspective.
Habermas’ thought is an unexpected ally from outside the Church in the project of rebuilding the civilization of love and restoring religious rights to the public sphere, and is worth summarizing here. I use the “Religion in the Public Sphere” article as source, and outline five principle points from the article in the following.
Habermas on Religion in the Public Sphere
First, Habermas has become concerned that the suppression of religion in the public sphere has created an unacceptable inequality between citizens of the state:
The liberal state must not transform the requisite institutional separation of the religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith. . . . [Citizens should not have to] split their identity into a public and private part the moment they participate in public discourses. They should therefore be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language if they cannot find secular ‘translations’ for them.[10]
Though it is questionable that religious speech should be “allowed,” as opposed to recognized as a basic right, I appreciate that he recognizes the burden and seeks to rectify it.
Second, he reasons that religious citizens have a burden, as far as possible, of “translating” religious reasoning into terms their secular counterparts can understand, to facilitate communication; and the freedom, if they can’t “translate,” to speak freely and publicly in religious terms. He also reasons that secular citizens have in turn the responsibility to listen for possible “truth” in religious arguments:
This requirement of translation must be conceived as a cooperative task in which the non-religious citizens must likewise participate, if their religious fellow citizens are not to be encumbered with an asymmetrical burden. . . . Secular citizens must open their minds to the possible truth content of those presentations and enter dialogues from which religious reasons then might well emerge in the transformed guise of generally accessible arguments.[11]
Note that Habermas, the secular atheist, is acknowledging that religious reasoning may contain “possible truth” that secularity should be open to. This is a far cry from the view of religion as oppressive “superstition” in the original Enlightenment view.
Third, Habermas observes that particular worldviews and religious doctrines are inherent to the formation of the person and cannot simply be laid aside in the public square, but must be taken into account in any public discourse. The expectation that they be laid aside, which he identifies as dominant since the Reformation and Enlightenment, places undue burdens on religious citizens and creates “cognitive dissonances” that, if they penetrate deeply enough into the fabric of the community, can cause its disintegration into irreconcilable segments:
In the absence of the uniting body of a civic solidarity . . . citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons [emphasis Habermas’] for their political statements and attitudes. This reciprocity of expectations among citizens is what distinguishes a community integrated by constitutional values from a community segmented along the dividing lines of competing world views.[12]
His view is based on the concept of the person as having both freedom and inherent dignity, which in the public sphere manifests as both the right to speak freely and be heard, and the duty to listen to and carefully consider the freely expressed views of other persons. He speaks of the danger to pluralistic civil society when “in the case of conflicts that cut deep, citizens need not adapt to or face one another as second persons” (emphasis Habermas’).[13]
He has developed this idea elsewhere in his theory of “communicative action.”[14] This theory is consistent with recent Catholic teaching on the person and society, beginning with the documents of Vatican II and expressed most recently in speeches and statements of Pope Benedict XVI, such as the Regensburg address,[15] which call for respectful, rational dialogue between persons and societies of differing religious and philosophical views.
Fourth, Habermas has come to believe that modern Liberalism is “intrinsically self-contradictory” because it represses and devalues the free speech of religious citizens, and demands of them “an effort to learn and adapt that secular citizens are spared having to make.”[16] He is highly critical of this prevailing secular prejudice against religion:
As long as secular citizens are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities are . . . archaic relics of pre-modern societies that continue to exist in the present, they will understand freedom of religion as the cultural version of the conservation of a species in danger of becoming extinct. From their viewpoint, religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist. . . . [Secular citizens] can obviously [not] be expected to take religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously and even to help to assess them for a substance that can possibly be expressed in a secular language and justified by secular arguments.
. . . The admission of religious statements to the political public sphere only makes sense if all citizens can be expected not to deny from the outset any possible cognitive substance to these contributions. . . . [Yet] such an attitude presupposes a mentality that is anything but a matter of course in the secularized societies of the West.[17]
Fifth and last, he criticizes the way that reason itself is used in secular culture, calling it inadequate and a danger. He calls for a “self-critical assessment of the limits of secular reason;”[18] the “overcoming of . . . a narrow secularist consciousness”;[19] and asks “secular citizens . . . [to be] prepared to learn something from the contributions to public debates made by their religious counterparts.”[20] He states “the ethics of democratic citizenship assumes secular citizens exhibit a mentality that is no less demanding than the corresponding mentality of their religious counterparts,”[21] and so calls citizens to a much higher standard of reasoning:
The polarization of the world views in a community that splits into fundamentalist and secular camps [shows] that an insufficient number of citizens matches up to the yardstick of the public use of reason and thereby endanger political integration.[22]
In sum, Habermas is proposing no less than a “revised concept of citizenship”[23] that simultaneously restores freedom of religious speech and reasoning to the public square and elevates the level of secular reasoning, with an equal duty of respect, listening, and reciprocity expected of all citizens. This is stunning in light of classical Enlightenment and Liberal thought on religion – and very hopeful, coming from such a prominent and respected secular atheist.
The Atheist and a Future Pope: On Common Ground
The release of Time of Transitions was not the only event of note in 2004. Prior to the release, on the evening of January 19, a meeting and debate took place between Habermas and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Benedict. It took place in Munich under the title “Pre-political moral foundations in the construction of a free civil society,” with a restricted audience of just 30 persons. One commentator on the meeting described it thus:
Here, then, were the makings of an epic duel, worthy to stand alongside Luther's famous confrontation with Zwingli or Heidegger's 1929 dispute with Cassirer at Davos. But the duel never took place. The transcript of the debate instead reveals the strange spectacle of philosopher and cardinal bending over backwards to accommodate each other. Habermas treats religious communities with great respect, claiming that they have "preserved intact something which has elsewhere been lost." And Ratzinger grants a central role to the "divine light of reason" in controlling the "pathologies of religion."[24]
The text of the position papers and debate have not yet been published in English (they are due out in book form in 2007[25]), but Nemoianu has written an analysis of the discussion with translations of his own from the original German.[26] In it, Habermas advocates a “two-way understanding of tolerance: the church-state relationship [as] one based upon reciprocity.”[27]
Of the debate, Nemoianu notes:
From the very beginning . . . Habermas admits the legitimacy of the question as to whether the secularized and rights-founded state is not nourished from normative premises that are alien to its own nature and antedate it. “This would raise some doubts as to the ability of the constitutional democratic state to renew its existential foundations from its own resources, rather than from philosophical and religious, or at least from a general ethical communal prior understanding.”[28]
Near the end of the debate, Habermas expressed his view that “a contrite modernity can find help in letting itself out if its dead-end only through a religious orientation . . . toward a transcendent point of reference,”[31] and “condemns all those who keep trying to sentence the religious discourse in the public square to silence, to eliminate and liquidate it altogether.”[32] Nemoianu notes the surprise the audience felt as it became apparent that Habermas was “more inclined to interact with ‘classical’ Roman Catholic theological positions”[33] than with more “innovative” thinkers such as Hans Kung.
Cardinal Ratzinger, for his part, did not begin with a religious argument, but rather with a “diagnosis of the state of affairs in the world at this moment,” in which he stressed the “globalized society in which political, economic, and cultural forces are closely intermeshed.”[34] When he did speak of religion, his comments were critical, admitting the “potential pathologies” of religion, expressed, for example, in “extreme Islamic fundamentalism,” while pointing out that these are symptomatic of a “desperate and exasperated need to affirm religious faith in an increasingly materialistic world.”[35]
His main point was that today Western civilization is divided in two, the “rationalist-scientific Weltanschauung” and the Christian tradition. Both are unbalanced, both in relation to reason. The former produces many dangers in the contemporary world due to the “pathologies” and “hubris” of reason,[36] what he defined in his critique of modern reason in his Regensburg address as “the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.”[37] The latter, on the other hand, suffers from a kind of insufficiency of reason:
At this particular point in time Christianity does not (yet?) enjoy the capability of establishing a set of principles readily accepted on a universal level. Ratzinger admitted that a critical and ‘cleansing’ potential of rational inquiry in religion is desirable.[38]
This he also defined at Regensburg, as a process of “dehellenization”[39] of theology, beginning with the Protestant Reformation, that discounted the relationship between faith and reason and rejected philosophical reasoning as a tool for theological development.
For Ratzinger, however, it is not sufficient for the two halves of the Western tradition merely to criticize one another, because they are no longer alone in the world but are part of a larger and growing global context:
He clearly stated that either of the two great branches of Western civilization can only legitimate themselves and gain universal acceptance by acknowledging the multicultural nature of our global society. They both have to face without hesitation the cognitive and existential horizons of the non-Western cultures that are our neighbors: Islamic, Hindu-Buddhist, and others yet. A renewed spiritual culture can be founded only on such forms of double dialog, particularly taking into account the apprehensions of these alternative cultures toward both Christianity, and even more, toward scientific rationalism. Both branches of Western intellectual life must “admit de facto that they are accepted only in parts of mankind and are intelligible only in parts of mankind.”[40]
In comparing the viewpoints of the two men, at least as Nemoianu presents it, Habermas the secular atheist comes across as the more backward looking, acknowledging the global context but preoccupied with the religious roots of and need for religious reasoning in secularism as a matter of cultural survival. Ratzinger, the future Pope, seems the most forward looking, acknowledging problems but focusing predominantly on the global context, looking for ways to engage pluralistic global culture in reasonable dialogue from the Christian perspective, which he sees as a matter of global survival.
Both points of view, in my opinion, are vital for healing the rift in our own culture and formulating a way to move forward in peaceful and constructive, rather than destructive, dialogue with the global community.
In the end, Nemoianu concludes of the debate,
One of the most interesting and encouraging sides of the whole episode . . . was actually the tone of the discussion. Pleasantly missing were the gross verbal violences that one encounters in French or American politics or elsewhere. . . . The repulsive brutalities and the tired simplicities of which Christianity had been the victim for over two hundred years in most of Europe find themselves evacuated like embarrassing impurities from a discussion at the level of the one between Ratzinger and Habermas. . . [One can conclude] that “Christophobia” is a social pathology, contemptible and harmful to individuals and to society, an obstacle in the path of any beneficial social evolution.[41]
The change in Habermas’ thinking and the resulting cordial “debate” with Ratzinger, where they not so much debated as discussed concerns they have in common in defending religion in the public sphere, is, in my opinion, a very significant development in terms of the goals and objectives of the Augustine Institute in rebuilding the civilization of love.
Summary and Conclusion
In sum, both Habermas and Ratzinger recognize that secular reason alone is insufficient to maintain liberal ideals and that reason itself is being used insufficiently in culture, and thus has become a danger to culture. They both recognize that religious reasoning is a source of truth that secular reasoning alone cannot provide, and without which it is unbalanced, so religious reasoning must be restored to the public square.
The atheist recognizes that the Christian underpinnings of secular reasoning and culture are irreplaceable, acknowledges we are moving to a post-secular phase, and calls for a reciprocal, rather than controlling, relationship between church and state. The theologian recognizes the need for rational dialogue, what the atheist calls “translation,” on the part of religion with both secular and global culture; both recognize that such rational dialogue must remain open to the transcendent.
In short, both are calling for a reapproachment between faith and reason that both looks back to the historical roots of Western culture and looks forward and outward to the global community.
This is a remarkable development. It is made symbolically more beautiful by the fact that they are both from Germany, birthplace of Luther and the Protestant Reformation, scene of Luther’s contest with the Pope of that time, where the ground was laid for the Enlightenment, the rise of secular Liberalism, the separation of faith from reason and, ultimately, the debasement of both faith and reason.
It also shows that the Church’s efforts to communicate with the world are beginning to work, if Habermas is hearing the message and seeing the rationality and needfulness of Christian reason in secular culture, and so is calling for “translation” so secularists can understand the message. Nemoianu concurs, and observes:
The coming challenges can be faced only if all kinds of forces, both inside Christianity as well as among well-meaning or normal-thinking people temporarily outside Christianity, find some common ground. The dialog with Habermas shows that efforts in this direction are not entirely hopeless; it also exemplifies what some of the strategies and value idioms to be used might be. Nothing short of the survival of the Good in a possible humane and harmonious world is at stake.[42]
It does appear that Habermas’ thinking, and that of others following his lead, is making itself felt in the US. In addition to examples I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the summer 2003 issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 2005, no. 3 issue of the Brigham Young University Law Review were both dedicated in their entirety to the topic of religion and secularity.
Moreover, the new thought has gone beyond academic circles. The Spring 2006 issue of the New Perspective Quarterly included an article by editor Nathan Gardels of Los Angeles, based on a series of conversations he had with Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, head of Phoenix Pictures. He discusses the impact of Hollywood in the global cultural conflict, and the need for Hollywood to realize that it is no longer “home alone,”[43] but part of a large and diverse global community. He asks hard questions about Hollywood’s role in culture, and devotes several paragraphs to both Habermas and the thought Pope John Paul II.
In conclusion, last semester in my program we studied the monk Benedict and role of his thought in the rise of Christendom in the Middle Ages, looking for ideas we might use in rebuilding a civilization of love in our time. I referred to him in the end of my paper for that term, and took the name of our new Pope, also Benedict, as a sign for our time. Nemoianu at the close of his article does the same, speaking both of the monk and of the predecessor Pope Benedict XV. Of the monk, he states:
[Benedict] knew how to assure with notable success the continuity of the values of late antiquity and of early Christianity in a world in which he and his were minorities . . . prone to persecution or to an uphill struggle at best. There is every reason to believe that this lesson is not forgotten by Benedict XVI: the lessons of the advantages carried by a leaner and more muscular Christianity, one optimistic in the face of barbarisms that change historically more in appearance than in substance.[44]
Benedict the monk was confronted with the wilderness of Europe; we are in a sense confronted with the wilderness of the world, and so must work to cultivate it, clearing swamps and removing roots, stones, and weeds of the mind, and preparing the soil for the sowing of the seed of Christ. Habermas in a sense may be the first “barbarian convert” of the global era, one whose witness may be very helpful in rebuilding the civilization of love in our world.
I close with the words of another theologian, the German-trained Hans Urs von Balthasar, in a little book he wrote in 1952 that presaged, and in certain respects helped lead to, the council of Vatican II that opened the Church to the world. His words, in which he speaks of the descent of the Church into contact with the world, may be considered prophetic in light of the developments outlined in this paper:
The fact that the Church was initially led in this descent where she did not wish to go (Jn 21:18) and that this occurred as a suffering and a humiliation for her, does not alter the fact that she took a very good path carefully planned by Providence. This path has brought her into contact with the world . . . in an awesome solidarity which is quite new in her experience. She, the “closed garden”, the “sealed-up spring”, the veiled Bride of the thousand monasteries, has been opened up by force and almost ravaged, now that the feet of the nameless multitudes tramp heavily through her soul.
. . . And bastions of the soul are still falling, and the more bastions that fall, the more interconnecting rooms come into existence . . . [bringing] back to the Father the world that was created through him, for him, and in him.[45]
[1] Giancarlo Bosetti and Klaus Eder, “Post-Secularism: A Return to the Public Sphere,” Eurozine, Aug. 17, 2006 [online journal]; available from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-08-17-eder-en.html; accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[2] Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge.”
[3] Nemoianu, 33.
[4] Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge.”
[5] Nemoianu, 23.
[6] Jurgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002).
[7] Jurgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2006).
[8] Case.
[9] Jurgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Originally published as Zurischen Nurischen Naturalismus und Religion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005).
[10] Jurgen Habermas, “Religion in
the Public Sphere,” trans. Jeremy Gaines, European
Journal of Philosophy 14:1 (2006): 9-10 [article online]; Internet;
available from http://www.law.nyu.edu/clppt/program2006/readings/Habermas.Religion.pdf;
accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[11] Ibid., 11.
[12] Ibid., 13.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Amherst: MIT Press, 1990).
[15] Pope Benedict XVI, Faith, Reason, and the University (2006).
[16] Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 13.
[17] Ibid., 15.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., 16.
[20] Ibid., 17.
[21] Ibid., 18.
[22] Ibid., 18.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Edward Skidelsky, “Habermas vs the Pope,” Prospect Magazine 116, Nov. 2005 [magazine online]; available from http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=7084; Internet; accessed Dec. 1, 2006.
[25] Joseph Ratzinger, Jurgen Habermas, The Dialectic of Secularism: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Igniatius, 2007).
[26] Nemoianu, above.
[27] Ibid., 22.
[28] Ibid., 24-25.
[29] Ibid., 25.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., 26.
[32] Ibid., 27.
[33] Ibid., 32.
[34] Ibid., 27.
[35] Ibid., 28.
[36] Ibid., 29.
[37] Pope Benedict XVI, Faith, Reason, and the University.
[38] Nemoianu, 29-30.
[39] Faith, Reason, and the University.
[40] Nemoianu, 30.
[41] Ibid., 37-38.
[42] Ibid., 30
[43] Nathan
Gardels, “Hollywood in the World,” New Perspectives
Quarterly: A Journal of Social and Political Thought 23, no. 2 (2006)
[journal online]; available from http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2006_spring/07_gardels.html;
Internet; accessed Dec. 5. 2006.
[44] Nemoianu, 38-39.
[45] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Franscisco: Ignatius, 1993), 99-102.
