> Dallmayr's pretty good; I know his philosophy of social science work.
A little too sympathetic to religion for my taste...
>From MPs post:
"At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization against the backdrop of the pervasive secularizing tendencies of (Western) modernity."
Bring back ye olde time religion? And
"Taking some cues from Panikkar, the concluding section reflects on the 'religion of the future' and the 'future of religion' in our globalizing world."
As a religionist... this kind of work is the bane of any method and theory interest... the divine, holy, sacred, luminous, numinosowhatever... it all comes down to some sort of dreadfull adherence to one tradition or another that is held up as salvatory while exploiting its competition and at the same time glorying its otherness. It takes on the appearance of being reflective but boils down to the same old thing. The best of them, at least when push comes to shove, start talking about the imaginary and fantasy instead of metaphysics... reminding those of us interesting in maintaining these invaluable concepts need to be really careful when using them - indicating explicitly (so it would seem) that they cannot be translated into religious concepts without suffering from some sort of theoretical punishment. In the last year or so I've seen a plethora of trumped up god-talk... the s(ub)lime body of god and all that... drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural studies, film and literature... pretty clever stuff even though it spins in circles... kind of reminds one that historiography is probably more important than the history of ideas.
Anyway, I encountered Dallmayr through Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology (1992) and it kind of turned me off.
ken