
Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek

“People talk about the return of religion, that’s a mistake. It didn’t return because it never went away” (Hoffman and Taylor, 2008).
Hollis Phelps • Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek
upended traditional metaphysics, concerned with the existence and nature of God, in favor of an analysis of the human subject and how he or she knows the world.
Hollis Phelps • Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek
Although secularization, when understood in light of the weakening of being, theoretically allows for a plurality of individual and collective beliefs, stances and paradigms, the medium in which these occur is essentially Christian, both in form and content.
Hollis Phelps • Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek
Having recognized its family resemblance with the biblical message of the history of salvation and with God’s incarnation, philosophy can call the weakening that it discovers as the characteristic feature of the history of Being secularization in its broadest sense, which comprises all forms of dissolution of the sacred characteristic of the modern
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The weakining of being or of existence itself (in general because of the death of God) is something that makes room for Christianity (even as it was predicted by Christianity). The incarnation and the Gospel were made to flourish in such a social-cultural environment (as it was in the 1st century). In fact, "weakness" and "death" or "dying to self" are crucial in the message of the Gospel… and in salvation. In the supposed death of metaphysics... and the death of God... there's now actually no room to deny him either.
Benjamin takes issue with Weber’s thesis concerning the development of capitalism as conditioned by Christianity. For Benjamin, the relationship is stronger: capitalism does not simply emerge out of Christianity, as a sort of by-product, but is rather a religious phenomenon in its own right, one that draws on, but also twists and reverses, Christia
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Vattimo rules out any sort of public display of identity, particularly religious identity, because of the way in which such displays cut against the secular organization of life.
Hollis Phelps • Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek
Is religion just a human projection or is there something divine about human thought?
Hollis Phelps • Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek
In the phenomena of religion, we are now confronted with fields of interpretation of reality itself.