The Post-Secular City: The New Secularization Debate

“The Post-Secular City” is the first attempt to systematically map and assess the recent debate about secularization. The book examines the alleged shift from a “secular” to a “post-secular” dispensation from the perspective of the ongoing de-construction of the secularization “theorem” (as Hans Blumenberg called it). Accordingly, the new secularization debate is described as being polarized between the “de-constructors” and the “maintainers” of the standard thesis of secularization. This is the assumption underlying an ambitious effort to map the field, which consists of a long introduction where “secularization” is analyzed as a deeply problematic concept-of-process and of eight chapters in which several protagonists of the recent debate are discussed as crucial junctions of a multidisciplinary conversation. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Secularization: A Modern Myth? Part I Deconstruction Chapter 1 A Strange Dispute at the Deathbed of Religion: Blumenberg and Löwith Cross Swords Chapter 2 A Work of Demolition and Reconstruction: David Martin Defies the Establishment Chapter 3 In Search of a New Grand Narrative: Charles Taylor’s Secularity Chapter 4 Working within a New Paradigm: Hans Joas’s Convergent Trajectory Chapter 5 Standing on the Edges of the New Paradigm: A Postcolonial Point of View Part II Maintenance Chapter 6 A Probe into Deep Time: Marcel Gauchet and the Problematic Exit from Religion Chapter 7 The Fragile Supremacy of Reason: Jürgen Habermas and the Concept of Post-Secularity Chapter 8 After the Death of God: Nietzsche’s Long Shadow Chapter 9 Conclusion: Do We Still Need the Concept of Secularization?