JRAT Supplementa is an interdisciplinary, international, online open-access book series with a double-blind peer-review process. It is closely linked to the Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (JRAT). The Supplementa series was founded in 2021 to supplement the journal with the publication of monographs, translations of important works and strongly focused anthologies. Both publications serve to introduce the research topics of the Research Centre “Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society” (RaT, University of Vienna) into the international discourse. The aim of both JRAT and JRAT Supplementa is to investigate the contribution of religion to the cultural, political, legal, and aesthetic dynamics in present-day pluralistic societies. Vice versa, the influence of current social transformation processes on religion and religious expressions is examined. The mutual impact of religious and societal transformation processes requires the cooperation of different academic disciplines, and opens up interdisciplinary research space both for theologians of different religious and confessional traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Islamic, etc.), as well as for researchers in the field of Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Social Sciences, Law, Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, Indology, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, Philosophy and Pedagogy, etc.
Current Issues
Editors: Hans Schelkshorn and Herman Westerink
The emergence and downfall of fascism and the Nazi regime in the mid-twentieth century mark the definitive decline of Europe's geopolitical hegemony. The end of the Second World War is the beginning of both decolonization processes and the founding of the United Nations as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this context, we find a variety of philosophical interpretations on religious traditions, secular conceptualizations of reason and political theories. In and outside of Europe, philosophical and spiritual movements develop different political orientations, whereas fruitful dialogues between religious and secular philosophical positions emerge. In this volume, such positions and interactions are explored in an exemplary way.
JRAT Supplementa, Volume 2: The Post-Secular City. The New Secularization Debate
Author: Paolo Costa
“The Post-Secular City” is the first attempt to systematically map and assess the recent debate about secularization.
“The Post-Secular City” examines the alleged shift from a “secular” to a “post-secular” dispensation from the perspective of the ongoing de-construction of the secularization “theorem” (as Hans Blumenberg called it). Accordingly, the new secularization debate is described as being polarized between the “de-constructors” and the “maintainers” of the standard thesis of secularization. This is the assumption underlying an ambitious effort to map the field, which consists of a long introduction where “secularization” is analyzed as a deeply problematic concept-of-process and of eight chapters in which several protagonists of the recent debate are discussed as crucial junctions of a multidisciplinary conversation.
JRAT Supplementa, Volume 1: In Praise of Mortality
edited by Kurt Appel
This volume shows that the vulnerability and mortality of life are the starting points of its transcendence which exceeds all representability.
Only by renouncing fantasies of omnipotence of a theological, philosophical and scientific nature, human beings can advance to their destiny and introduce a New Humanism enabling a bond between all that is alive and between human beings and their transcendent dimension. This includes an understanding of time that no longer follows chronological-mechanistic constraints, a non-instrumental understanding of language that finds its dimension of depth in prayer and an understanding of God in which God is inseparably related to the openness of human existence. In traversing the arising avenues of thought, the four-part volume, written by three authors but to be read as a unity, is oriented towards a philosophy of central biblical passages, Hegel‘s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Musil‘s Man Without Qualities, Hölderlin‘s poetry and Lacan´s psychoanalysis.