In The Boston Review, Brandon Bloch takes stock of Jürgen Habermas’s relationship to Christianity in a review of his latest book, This Too a History of Philosophy:

This Too a History of Philosophy marks the culmination of a third stage of Habermas’s career, one in which questions of faith and religion have assumed increasing prominence. Habermas’s earlier work hinged on a theory of secularization. Whatever one’s private convictions, the public sphere depended on the exchange of ‘validity claims’ accessible to all citizens; appeals to faith had to be checked at the door. Yet in an address one month after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Habermas characterized contemporary Western democracies as ‘postsecular’ societies. The public sphere, he now argued, should accommodate religious diversity and permit the participation of religious citizens. Habermas went further in a 2005 essay that followed a public discussion with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). Not only should religious and secular citizens have equal access to the public sphere, but the latter ‘can be reasonably expected not to exclude the possibility that [religious] contributions may have cognitive substance.’

For some of Habermas’s secular-minded interlocutors, these apparent concessions to religion betrayed the rational promise of critical social theory. Yet as with so much in Habermas, what seems an about-face reflects a deepening of earlier concerns. My own research on Protestant intellectual networks in early postwar Germany uncovered evidence of Habermas’s participation in ‘Christian-Marxist’ working groups during the early 1960s. And since the 1980s, Habermas has engaged in philosophical exchanges with prominent Christian theologians, most notably his Catholic contemporary Johann Baptist Metz. Habermas’s recent writings build upon his longstanding view that religious citizens can contribute moral insight to the public sphere—and that they did so in a democratizing Germany. As Europe absorbs new waves of Muslim immigrants, Habermas has sought to combat xenophobic discourses of cultural difference, while fostering democratic deliberation across religious divides.

But more provocative convictions drive Habermas’s writings on religion as well. Notwithstanding his advocacy for a religiously plural public sphere, Habermas has remained emphatic about the foundational role of Western Christianity. Already in The Theory of Communicative Action, he drew on the classical sociologist Max Weber to trace the rise of modern purposive rationality out of the Protestant idea of vocation. More recently, Habermas has distanced himself from claims of Weberian disenchantment to suggest that the process of secularization remains incomplete. ‘Universalistic egalitarianism,’ he stated in a 2002 interview, ‘is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love . . . Up to this very day there is no alternative to it.’ Drawing a dubious contrast between the two monotheistic religions, Habermas articulated what would become the core of his intellectual program. The West’s Judeo-Christian heritage was not a passing phase in the emergence of modern thought and politics, but contributed—and perhaps still contributes—its essential core.

This Too a History of Philosophy is the realization of Habermas’s claim on a grand scale. At its most basic, the work provides a historical survey linking Habermas’s longstanding theory of communication with his more recent argument for the preeminence of Judeo-Christianity. The central thesis is expansive but straightforward. Communicative rationality as well as constitutional democracy emerged out of a three-thousand-year dialogue between the two poles of Western thought: faith and knowledge. Through a protracted history of intellectual debate and social transformation, the moral universalism at the core of Christianity—having evolved out of its Jewish precursor—was subsumed into modern, postmetaphysical thinking. Habermas’s account of secularization departs from what the philosopher Charles Taylor has termed the ‘subtraction story,’ by which irrational beliefs are stripped away with the forward march of science. Instead, Habermas reconstructs the interactions of Christian faith and worldly knowledge as a process not of conflict, but of mutual learning and translation.

In other news: Another botched art restoration job in Spain: “Conservation experts in Spain have called for a tightening of the laws covering restoration work after a copy of a famous painting by the baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo became the latest in a long line of artworks to suffer a damaging and disfiguring repair. A private art collector in Valencia was reportedly charged €1,200 by a furniture restorer to have the picture of the Immaculate Conception cleaned. However, the job did not go as planned and the face of the Virgin Mary was left unrecognisable despite two attempts to restore it to its original state.”

Jessica Hooten Wilson responds to Paul Elie’s piece in The New Yorker last week on Flannery O’Connor and racism: “Rather than preach to the choir, O’Connor tried to change those who thought differently; in her fiction, she often moved racist characters from sin to redemption. For the past five years, I have been editing O’Connor’s third novel, which she was working on when she died. It is called Why Do the Heathen Rage? The plot centers on a white man who writes letters to a white woman, a civil rights activist in New York. In his correspondence with her, this man pretends to be black. He is testing whether she loves people as much as she claims she does. O’Connor planned for the novel to end with his conversion, his comeuppance. The story takes a close look at Koinonia, the integrationist farm in Americus, Georgia, established by the Baptist radical Clarence Jordan. Why Do the Heathen Rage? shows that O’Connor did not shy away from difficult conversations, but used her fiction to call for Southerners to repent of racist attitudes.”

Rhode Island moves to change its name because of its racist “connotations”: “Rhode Island is moving toward changing its official name—‘The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’—due to its slavery connotations. Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) signed an executive order on Monday declaring that her office would not use the word ‘Plantations’ in future executive orders, citations or on its website.”

Lauren Weiner reviews Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism.

A short history of door handle design: “For as long as there have been doors there have been door handles. They may have been primitive to start, an iron or wooden latch, a turned wooden knob, a piece of string or a leather strap.  By the 18th century houses in central Europe displayed elaborate wrought-iron lever handles on their front doors, French palaces showed off with delicately cast brass versions and English houses preferred simple round or oval knobs. Manufacture was relatively local and types developed in specific regions, each with their own tastes and materials. They might be wooden knobs in the forms of beehives and small levers with wooden grips, or made out of porcelain or ceramic.”

“The United States’ frenzy of statuary iconoclasm has taken a turn into the theater of the absurd. Knocking down or defacing statues of national founders or heroes not only displays ignorance of history but also assaults the principles of Western civilization that allow for racial progress to continue,” Henry Olson writes.

Photos: Solar eclipse

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