Religious Difference and Democratic Pluralism: Some Recent Debates and Frameworks

Authors

  • CHARLES HIRSCHKIND University of California

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.4602

Abstract

While until quite recently debates in political philosophy on questions of pluralism, tolerance, and liberal governance foregrounded notions of culture and cultural difference, today it is religion that increasingly provides the historical and conceptual resources for the contemporary reassessment of the pragmatic and philosophical conditions for pluralist democracy. Drawing on a few recent writings in the field of political theology, this paper explores some of the analytical directions that this repositioning of religion within contemporary narratives of modernity has opened up within political philosophy. As I seek to demonstrate, the domain of political theology has become the problem space, where the tensions and contradictions between a simultaneous insistence on Europe's secular identity and its Christian one are being elaborated. Through a ceratin double movement, secularism and Christianity have become productively fused within the writings I address, in a way that repeats the story of European exeptionality while inscribing the essential otherness of the Muslim populations within its borders. In the second part of the paper, I want to contrast these reflections from political philosophy with debates in postcolonial Egypt around issues of religion and the possibility of democratic pluralism.

Downloads

Published

2008-01-01

How to Cite

HIRSCHKIND, C. (2008). Religious Difference and Democratic Pluralism: Some Recent Debates and Frameworks. Temenos - Nordic Journal for the Study of Religion, 44(1). https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.4602

Issue

Vol. 44 No. 1 (2008)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2008 Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported License.

Author's Guarantee

  • The Author acknowledges that the Work will be publicly accessible on the Internet and that such access will be free of charge for the readers.
  • The Author guarantees that the Work is her/his original work that has not been published before and cannot be construed as copying or plagiarism. Furthermore, the Author confirms that the Work contains no statement that is unlawful, defamatory or abusive or in any way infringes the rights of others.
  • The Author confirms that she/he has secured all written permissions needed for the reproduction in the Publication of any material created by a third party.

User Rights

Under the CC BY 4.0 license, the Author/s and users are free to:

  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially,
  • However, the Work must be attributed to the original Author and source of publication.

The license of the published metadata is Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)

Author Rights

The Authors maintain the right to:

  • copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the Work,
  • the right to use the substance of the Work in future own works,
  • the right to self-archiving/parallel publishing (publisher's PDF allowed).

Rights of Publisher

  • The Publisher reserves the right to make such editorial changes as may be necessary to make the Work suitable for publication in the publication, e.g. style of punctuation, spelling, headings and the like.
  • The Publisher will publish the Work if the editorial process is successfully completed and reserves the right not to proceed with publication for whatever reason.
  • The publication entitles the author to no royalties or other fees. This agreement will be governed by the laws of Finland.