Madam, - Derek Scally has done readers a service by not shirking from an account of current intellectual developments in Germany (Dec 24th). He writes of efforts by a respected German thinker, Jürgen Habermas, to break the stalemate between those who hold a narrow secularist view of the world and those who advance a simplistic religious version of reality.
Like Thomas Aquinas, whom Habermas greatly admires, the German academic is a strong proponent of the rational but does not assume that words can necessarily express our full range of experience. Unlike some more fervent philosophers, he does not assume that it is only a matter of time before "science" cracks open a code of nature that reveals everything about us in a vocabulary that is explicitly comprehensive.
While Scally writes that Habermas began to think in this vein after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, there were already various indications that he had, since no later than 1991, started to reassess his own philosophy and to rearticulate his renowned "Theory of Communicative Action". Long before he had his more recent dialogue with the German who is now pope, Habermas had engaged respectfully with the work of theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz and Michael Theunissen.
These developments have been tracked in a book that appeared earlier than the new German title mentioned by Scally, the earlier being published in English as Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, (ed. Eduardo Mendieta, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002).
These are developments of relevance not only to philosophers and academics but to every man and woman bemused by our modern predicament. If we do not wish to surrender to forms of religious or secular thought that are more comforting than true then we need to question our assumptions (without giving up our minds).
The willingness of Habermas to shift ground is one manifestation of a wider interest in exploring old religious ideas in new ways. At Dublin City University, we will be offering a new module to students in a few weeks that is to be jointly taught by staff from a number of disciplines at DCU and at our linked colleges of St Patrick's and Mater Dei. Some of those teaching and learning will be "believers" and some not, but all will be considering "belief" and how we communicate it in ways that address recurrent human concerns. - Yours etc.
COLUM KENNY,
School of Communications,
Dublin City University.