Thomas A. Lewis

Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel

Introduction 1. Civil Religion and Social Reform: Hegels Early Reflection on Religion 2. The Philosophical Basis of Hegels Philosophy of Religion 3. Locating the Philosophy of Religion 4. The Concept of Religion: Hegels God and the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy 5. Spirit and/in History 6. The Consummation of Religion 7. Cultivating Our Intuitions: Hegel on Religion, Politics, and Public Discourse Conclusion

On the Limits of Narrative: Communities in Pluralistic Society*

It feels good. . . . To start with, community is a “warm” place, a cosy and comfortable place. It is like a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day. . . . In a community, we all understand each other well, we may trust what we hear, we are safe most of the time and hardly ever puzzled or taken aback. . . . What the word evokes is everything we miss and what we lack to be secure, confident and trusting. In short, “community” stands for the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us—but which we would dearly wish to inhabit and which we hope to repossess.

Overcoming a Stumbling Block: A Nontraditional Hegel for Religious Studies*

G. W. F. Hegel elaborated a grand project that attributes a central role to “spirit” ðvariously understoodÞ and that has profoundly influenced diverse streams of modern thought. Among interpreters of Hegel, this is about where the agreement ends. Despite the nearly two centuries since his death and the reams of scholarship dedicated to his thought, we still have not reached a consensus on the most basic elements of his project. Prominent scholars of Hegel disagree about whether he is one of the great modern theorists of freedom or one the great totalitarians, whether he is a great rationalist or a great mystic, a staunch defender of Protestant orthodoxy or a giant step in the history of secularism. Or whether he is somehow all of these things. Moreover, we cannot agree about the central concept of spirit—or even whether it should be capitalized in English. Of late, much of the disagreement has focused on Hegel’s relationship to Kant. If Kant set much of the agenda for German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debate still rages as to whether Hegel’s response to this agenda was to rebuild metaphysics in a way that would protect it from Kant’s critique or to forge ahead with the Kantian project itself. In recent decades, this issue has defined one of the liveliest and most consequential fault lines in Hegel scholarship. In what some scholars have come to describe as “traditional” interpretations ðthough we are dealing here, at a minimum, with a family of interpretationsÞ, a Hegelian conception of “absolute Spirit”—usually written in English with a capital S—is understood in strongly metaphysical and religious terms. Rather than accepting Kant’s critiques of the possibility of

HETEROGENEOUS COMMUNITY: BEYOND NEW TRADITIONALISM

Recent discussions of community have often invoked a shared narrative tradition – usually a shared religious tradition or subtradition – as the defining feature. These calls for the revival of community have frequently accompanied laments over social fragmentation and atomization, particularly in Europe and North America. Alasdair MacIntyre’s attempt to articulate a political vision grounded in an Aristotelian account of shared goods and narratives constitutes one of the most significant representatives of this current. After setting out his position and its dire consequences for pluralistic societies, this essay focuses on MacIntyre’s move from practices to tradition and argues that shared practices – particularly shared political commitments – may generate and unite groups that do not share a common meta-narrative but nonetheless constitute a community with shared discursive practices. The Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez is particularly helpful in theorizing a notion of community that allows for great differences in the comprehensive narratives in terms of which participants define their lives. The result is a conception of a deeply pluralistic, arguably fragmented society composed of citizens belonging to multiple, intersecting, but not concentric, communities.

Beyond Love: Hegel on the Limits of Love in Modern Society

Abstract Early in his development, love played the central role in Hegel’s attempts to overcome fragmentation and division both within society and within the self. This initial conception of love was decisively shaped by his early romantic contemporaries. Hegel soon came to see, however, that love so conceived threatens a sense of individuality intrinsic to modern identity and cannot be a basis for modern social cohesion. This form of love binds people so closely that it becomes oppressive. Hegel’s mature alternative to this early view incorporates love into a more complex conception of modern society. Here, love finds expression and plays a central role in the family, but broader social cohesion is underwritten by a diverse range of affective attachments other than love. This strategy motivates a surprisingly subtle account of patriotism together with substantial emphasis on the role of religious institutions in shaping our political dispositions.

Ethical Formation and Ordinary Life in the Modern West: The Case of Work

A great deal of contemporary work in ethics has focused on a purported absence in modern ethical thought: an absence of ethical practices for the formation of good character. The “East” as well as the ancient and medieval West are frequently contrasted with a Western modernity that rejected the need for ethical or spiritual formation through practice.1 Alasdair MacIntyre has perhaps been most influential in his critique of modernity for its inattention to practices, yet the assumption is widely held (even among those critical of MacIntyre’s particular narrative) that such regimes of practice—which typically involve hierarchical relationships, subjection, and authority—are at odds with Western modernity’s focus on freedom and autonomy.2 To be sure, important recent contributions have qualified this picture, yet they have not dramatically transformed this impression.3