Humanism and Religion

Abstract

The question of who ‘we’ are and what vision of humanity ‘we’ assume to undergird Western culture lies at the heart of hotly debated questions on the role of religion in education, politics, and culture in general. Ongoing complaints about higher education, and the apparent failure by European secular societies to integrate religiously vibrant cultures reveal a profound lack of identity and purpose within Western culture. This book suggests that the long-standing separation of reason and faith offers an explanation for the West's cultural malaise. The author proposes that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western societies. Tracing the Christian roots of humanism from patristic theology, through the Renaissance into modern philosophy reveals the religious foundation for the correlation of reason and faith based on the incarnation that enabled central Western values. Drawing on this history, the author combines humanism, religion, and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine a humanistic ethos for our current cultural and intellectual climate. The hope of this recovery is for humanism to become what Charles Taylor has called a ‘social imaginary’, an internalized vision of what it means to be human. This vision will encourage, once again, the correlation of reason and faith in order to overcome current cultural impasses, such as those posed, for example, by religious and secularist fundamentalisms.