Hans Joas
Do We Need Religon?
On the Experience of Self-Transcendence
Boulder: Paradigm Publishers 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59451-439-5
153 Seiten, $26.95
The old assumption that modernization leads to secularization is outdated.
Yet the certainty that religion is an anthropological universal that can
only be suppressed by governments is also dead. Thus it is now a favorable
moment for a new perspective on religion. This book takes human experiences
of self-transcendence as its point of departure. Religious faith is seen
as an attempt to articulate and interpret such experiences. Faith then
is neither useful nor a symptom of weakness or misery, but an opening
up of ways of experience. This book develops this basic idea, contrasts
it with the thinking of some leading religious thinkers of our time, and
relates it to the current debates about human rights and universal human
dignity.