JRAT Supplementa, Volume 2: The Post-Secular City. The New Secularization Debate

Autor: Paolo Costa

“The Post-Secular City” is the first attempt to systematically map and assess the recent debate about secularization.
“The Post-Secular City” examines the alleged shift from a “secular” to a “post-secular” dispensation from the perspective of the ongoing de-construction of the secularization “theorem” (as Hans Blumenberg called it). Accordingly, the new secularization debate is described as being polarized between the “de-constructors” and the “maintainers” of the standard thesis of secularization. This is the assumption underlying an ambitious effort to map the field, which consists of a long introduction where “secularization” is analyzed as a deeply problematic concept-of-process and of eight chapters in which several protagonists of the recent debate are discussed as crucial junctions of a multidisciplinary conversation.

JRAT Supplementa, Volume 1: In Praise of Mortality

edited by Kurt Appel

This volume shows that the vulnerability and mortality of life are the starting points of its transcendence which exceeds all representability.
Only by renouncing fantasies of omnipotence of a theological, philosophical and scientific nature, human beings can advance to their destiny and introduce a New Humanism enabling a bond between all that is alive and between human beings and their transcendent dimension. This includes an understanding of time that no longer follows chronological-mechanistic constraints, a non-instrumental understanding of language that finds its dimension of depth in prayer and an understanding of God in which God is inseparably related to the openness of human existence. In traversing the arising avenues of thought, the four-part volume, written by three authors but to be read as a unity, is oriented towards a philosophy of central biblical passages, Hegel‘s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Musil‘s Man Without Qualities, Hölderlin‘s poetry and Lacan´s psychoanalysis.