In readings of Walter Benjamin's work, religion often marks a boundary between scholarly camps, but it rarely receives close and sustained scrutiny. Benjamin's most influential writings pertain to modern art and culture, but he frequently used religious language while rejecting both secularism and religious revival. Benjamin was, in today's terms, postsecular. Postsecular Benjamin explicates Benjamin's engagements with religious traditions as resources for contemporary debates on secularism, conflict, and identity. Brian Britt argues that what animates this work on tradition is the question of human agency, which he pursues through lively and sustained experimentation with ways of thinking, reading, and writing.

Walter Benjamin and the Post-Kantian Tradition engages with Benjamin as a theorist of a historical and philosophical problematic, and demonstrates how Benjamin moves from an aspiring idealist philosopher to a politically engaged Marxist critic without abandoning the theoretical project he develops early on.

Post-secularism is the fundamental evidence of the end of modernity. Modernity, as sleeping reason in Francisco Goya's painting, realizes that, although it thought that it was awake, it was producing monsters. We try to analyze post-secular philosophy from the point of view of Russian religious thought. We believe that such philosophers as Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, Sergey Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky, and Semen Frank may be helpful for understanding and overcoming post-secular order. Their unique views on the relations between religion and philosophy, science, and social life are apparently missing in the current Western debates. It seems to us that Russian religious philosophy becomes surprisingly up-to-date and attractive in the contemporary world. We hope that the present volume will be a significant step forward in the inclusion of the heritage of Russian religious philosophy in contemporary debates.

Islam in the Post-Secular Society: Religion, Secularity and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith critically examines the unique challenges facing Muslims in Europe and North America. From the philosophical perspective of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, this book attempts not only to diagnose the current problems stemming from a marginalization of Islam in the secular West, but also to offer a proposal for a Habermasian discourse between the religious and the secular. By highlighting historical examples of Islamic and western rapprochement, and rejecting the ‘clash of civilization’ thesis, the author attempts to find a ‘common language’ between the religious and the secular, which can serve as a vehicle for a future reconciliation.

Tracing Walter Benjamin's convergences with, and divergences from, influential German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this edited collection contextualizes Benjamin's thinking in the intellectual currents of his time, while also placing him in dialogue with traditions and thinkers from antiquity to the present. At stake is whether Benjamin presents the possibility of a distinctive political theology-a question which the collection addresses without collapsing the tensions internal to Benjamin's thought. Benjamin's thought has been a touchstone, explicitly or implicitly, in numerous efforts to conceive of a 'new' political theology that is not anchored in legitimizing and preserving power, but in justice and liberation. Benjamin interrogates the political-theological complex from what may be construed as a vantage point opposed to Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt excavates the theological elements in modernity in order to shore up liberalism's illiberal inheritance, Benjamin roots out these latent structures in order to dissolve them and liberate us from their oppressive legacy. This volume's multifaceted contributions explore why Benjamin has been such a fertile source for thinking about political theology beyond – and often against – Schmitt. Benjamin indicates how existing political theologies can be challenged or expanded. This book accordingly makes a wide range of relevant work available for study whilst also opening new perspectives on Benjamin's œuvre.

The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee. This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions. Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany. Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.

This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the intersections between crisis, scholarship, and action. The aim of this book is to think about the “moment of crisis,” through the concepts, writings, and methodologies awarded to us by Jewish thinkers in modernity. This book offers a broad gallery of accounts on the notion of crisis in Jewish modernity while emphasizing three terms: interpretation, heresy, and messianism. The main thesis of the volume is that the diasporic and exilic experience of the Jewish people turned their philosophers and theologians into “experts in crisis management” who had to find resources within their own religion, culture and traditions in order to react, endure and overcome short- and long-term historical crises. The underlining assumption of this book is therefore that Jewish thought obtains resources for conceptualizing and reacting to the current forms of crisis in the global, European, and Israeli spheres. The volume addresses a large readership in humanities, social and political sciences and religious studies, taking as its assumption that scholars in modern Jewish thought have an extended responsibility to engage in contemporary debates.