Religion in Reason Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries

Introduction

Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster

1 Theology on Edge

2 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics

3 Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to Worship the Invisible

4 Theology’s Figures of Abandon: Revisiting the Topic of Original Affirmation

5 Theology as Searchlight: Miracle, Event, and the Place of the Natural

6 Are Miracles Possible?: Avicenna Revisited

7 On Laws and Miracles

8 Spiritual Exercise in the Age of their Technological Reproducibility

9 Violence Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille

10 The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal

11 Corpus Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries

12 Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory: John Rawls and Hent de Vries

13 Adorno’s Secular Theology

14 Religion as Pre-Text, Art as Counter-Text

15 Anti-Retractationes: On Inexistence, Divine, and Other

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