1st Edition
Religion in Reason Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries
This book presents critical engagements with the work of Hent de Vries, widely regarded as one of the most important living philosophers of religion. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars discuss the role played by religion in philosophy; the emergence and possibilities of the category of religion; and the relation between religion and violence, secularism, and sovereignty. Together, they provide a synoptic view of how de Vries’s work has prompted a reconceptualization of how religion should be studied, especially in relation to theology, politics, and new media. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, and philosophy.
Introduction
Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
1 Theology on Edge
Tomoko Masuzawa
2 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics
Gwenaëlle Aubry
Translated by Jacob Levi
3 Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible
Elliot R. Wolfson
4 Theology’s Figures of Abandon: Revisiting the Topic of Original Affirmation
Asja Szafraniec
5 Theology as Searchlight: Miracle, Event, and the Place of the Natural
Willemien Otten
6 Are Miracles Possible?: Avicenna Revisited
Sari Nusseibeih
7 On Laws and Miracles
Ilit Ferber
8 Spiritual Exercise in the Age of their Technological Reproducibility
Eli Friedlander
9 Violence Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille
Samantha Carmel
10 The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal
Sarah Hammerschlag
11 Corpus Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries
Burcht Pranger
12 Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory: John Rawls and Hent de Vries
Alexandre Lefebvre
13 Adorno’s Secular Theology
Peter E. Gordon
14 Religion as Pre-Text, Art as Counter-Text
Mieke Bal
15 Anti-Retractationes: On Inexistence, Divine, and Other
Hent de Vries
Appendix: List of Hent de Vries’s Works
Biography
Tarek R. Dika is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Descartes’s Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science (2023) and the co-author, with W. Chris Hackett, of Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (2016) as well as numerous articles on Descartes, Heidegger, and contemporary French phenomenology.
Martin Shuster is Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at University of North Carolina—Charlotte. In addition to many articles and essays, he is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (2014), New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (2017), and How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism (2021). With Anne O’Byrne he is the editor of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World (Routledge, 2020).
"This must-read collection of essays by a globally renowned choir of voices is more than a profound, pulsating celebration of Hent de Vries’ pathbreaking contribution to the sociology, politics and philosophy of religion: it’s a right-on-time engagement with religion’s past, present and future as the killing knee of oppression, the soul of hope, a stomp down, a prayer, a terror, a metaphysic and, even, a joy." - Anita L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania
"Hent de Vries is among the most intrepid explorers of the intersection of religion and reason in post-modernity. This fascinating volume will henceforth serve as the starting point for anyone seeking to engage his thought. Each contributor is a luminary, each contribution a chiseled gem. Together they illuminate de Vries’ oeuvre, and simultaneously take on some of the most pressing questions of contemporary politics, ethics, theology, and metaphysics." - David Nirenberg, Institute for Advanced Study
"The rich and diverse essays in Religion in Reason testify to the multidisciplinary interventions and enduring relevance of Hent de Vries’s work in the fields of philosophy, theology, and political theory. This wonderful volume offers learned and exciting readings of, among others, Adorno, Aquinas, Derrida, Duns Scotus, Freud, Heidegger, Levinas, Charles Taylor, and Max Weber. Most broadly, anyone interested in religion, secularism, religious and political violence, as well as the role that theology might and does play in the modern world, has much to gain from the learned and engaging essays in this volume." - Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University
