Habermas and Theology. By Nicholas Adams

ABSTACT This paper explores the complex relationship between the Roman Catholic and Science on Contraception. A small interview undertaken by the author among the Kenyan Catholic women reveals that many Catholic women today, even those who still attend church and appear to be participating in their faith tradition, deviate from the moral restriction of the church on the use of artificial birth control and do use contraceptives. The author concludes that the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual morality may no longer be authoritative for some Catholic women. Rather, for these women, science may be a more compelling authority and source of ideas on the use and morality of artificial contraception. The paper therefore proposes ‘Habermas Theory of Communicative Action’ as platform through which the Church and Science may foster on an authentic dialogue that is vital in their interplay on the contraception debate in the postmodernity.

Theological Studies, 1996

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. Keywords Jürgen Habermas – critical theory and religion – postmetaphysical thinking – political theology – religious history – religious language

In this paper we would like to present a certain philosophical concept, which may be related to some contemporary philosophical controversies (and to political philosophy' controversies included) concentrated around such problems as subject, as the meaning of metaphysics and as the understanding of freedom. We are going also to say a word about the particularity of the philosophical understanding of reality, including the status of intention for agreement. The concept we present further for additional foundation of Habermas' idea of communicative action is a compound of metaphysics itself, of our own concept of metaphysics, and of the two particular questions -interpretation of Plato's philosophy as well as interpretation of the Biblical message about anthropogenesis.

2012

The article addresses the question of the respect owed to believers and their faiths and states that a demand for respect for the person of the believer does not imply a demand for respect for their faith. However, being 'respect' a complex and ambiguous notion, the article studies some arguments that go in the direction of justifying the move from respect for persons to respect for their beliefs. According to Habermas, there is a respect citizens of a democracy owe each other that requires taking each other's opinions seriously, including their religiously motivated opinions. What is more, Habermas claims that we all have something to learn from each other. The articles argues against this line of thought and states there is no obligation to respect anything about people's moral claims except their right to make them. The article argues against Habermas's approach by showing its epistemological and ontological inconsistency and concludes that respect for persons...

History of the Human Sciences, 1993

The Journal of Religion, 1994

At 86, Jürgen Habermas remains one of the most inf luential 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.

2019

Jürgen Habermas’s communicative theory is characterised by a postmetaphysical account of morality. This perspective stems from Habermas’s appropriation of Modernisation Theory (MT), with the Weberian distinction between questions of taste, truth and rightness. In view of the “disenchantment of the world”, Habermas proclaims the autonomy of science and morality from metaphysical perceptions, and conflates substantive ethics with issues of taste. As I demonstrate, such distinction between ethical and moral reasons takes the validity of MT, along with its epistemological assumptions, as a presupposition for the requirement of universal and impartial normative claims in discourse acts. However, this aprioristic validation of MT is at odds with Habermas’s own view that particular linguistic schemes of reason determine epistemological and truth standards of validity – as in accordance with a Pragmatic Theory of Meaning (PTM). Thus, by challenging Habermas’s differentiation of ethics and morality, I argue that communicative rationality should allow for a substantive account of normative validation, which in my theoretical framework combines elements of Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of traditions, reconfigured into a universalistic project of ethical learning. Furthermore, I contend that once the validity of MT is brought into question through PTM, metaphysical reasons can be rehabilitated for the justification of metaethical principles of communicative action.

The relationship between religious faith and public reason has occupied an increasingly central role in Jürgen Habermas's mature work. Yet this recent engagement with questions of religious meaning also illuminates a significant area of development in Habermas's thought. While his earlier writings emphasized a need to subordinate religious beliefs to rational critique and to translate religious truth claims into publicly accessible forms of reasoning, his later writings signal a shift to a more cooperative understanding of religious faith and critical reason that highlights the ongoing potential of religion to advance rational discourse and social criticism in the public sphere. This essay traces this growing recognition of the irreducibility of religious meaning in Habermas's writings, and it attends to the non-translatable dimension of religious faith as a source of its ongoing contemporary significance.