Exploring the Postsecular: the Religious, the Political and the Urban/Eds. Arie Molendijk, Justin Beaumont and Christoph Jedan. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010. - 406 p.

The collection Exploring the Post-Secular: Religious, Political and Urban Contexts, which grew out of a 2008 conference held at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), is one of the first attempts at a comprehensive academic study of post-secular issues. In this sense, it is the first in a series of several similar publications that have been published in recent years.1
The collection consists of four parts: the first part contains introductory articles by Justin Beaumont and Kim Knott, which attempt to outline the main research agenda to which this collection is devoted: post-secular issues in the context of modern urban studies and the so-called "spatial turn" in social theory. The second part contains theoretical essays devoted to the conceptualization of the concept of "postsecular". The third part focuses on the urban dimension of post-secularism, in particular, special attention is paid to the experience of religious NGOs (faith-based organizations) and their experience of participating in solving social problems of a modern metropolis. Finally, the fourth part is devoted to the Habermas-Rawls problem of "post-secular society" and "public reason". The obvious strength of the collection is its interdisciplinarity: the postsecular is dissected through the prism of different disciplines-urban studies, sociology, philosophy, etc.-

1. Например, см.: Postsecular Cities: Religious Space, Theory and Practice/Eds. J. Beaumont, Ch. Baker. New York, London: Continuum, 2011; After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion/Eds. A. P. Smith, D. Whistler. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011; The Post Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society/ Ed. Ph. Gorski. New York, London: New York University Press, 2012.

page 294
in different cultural and geographical contexts. The voice of theologians is also intertwined in this disciplinary polyphony - in particular, the articles of feminist theologian Maaike de Haardt, as well as Luke Bretherton and Paul Cloke. It is worth noting that it is the theological approaches to the post-secular that are among the most interesting, since in this case we are talking not only about describing the processes that are taking place, but also about the direct influence of theology on them, since the latter paves new semantic paths and lays the foundations for new practices, which then become the subject of study by sociologists, urbanists, religious scholars, and other specialists.

If we take into account the relative novelty of all post-secular issues, it is not surprising that the theoretical conceptualization of the post-secular turns out to be one of the key semantic lines of the collection. Even on the first pages of the publication, the authors explain exactly what they mean when they speak of the post-secular: "we use the term 'post-secular' to refer to the fact that within the secularized social structures of late-modern capitalism, religions not only remain present, but also do not show any signs of disappearing in the future.""(p. x). However, this is still a rather vague and very general definition, which necessarily needs to be detailed and explained with concrete examples.

The entire second part of the collection, entitled "Conceptualizing the Postsecular", is devoted to this topic. A constantly recurring theme in the conceptualization of the post-secular is an indication of the similarity of discussions about the post-secular with discussions about the postmodern. In particular, this similarity is noticed by Michel Leezenberg in the article " How ethnocentric is the concept of the post-secular?" (p. 93). This similarity is only reinforced by the attempts of Candice Dias and Justin Beaumont (p. 267-279) to replace the concept of "post-secular" with the concept of "late secularism" by analogy with Anthony Giddens ' late modernity, since the current trends, according to these authors, are very similar to those of late modernity. They do not indicate the overcoming of secularism, but only its further transformation. James Beckford, who refuses to see modern deprivation, thinks in the same vein.-

page 295
It is a sign of any qualitative changes and suggests that religious processes in Great Britain and France, in particular, should be considered as an ongoing erosion of religious oligopolies, requiring the authorities to make changes to the previous religious policy (p. 390). For example, in France, according to Beckford, we are not talking about the transition to post-secularism, but rather about the evolution of French Laicism, its transition to the status of "positive laicism" (p. 394).

The concept of postsecularity - and this is noticeable in many materials of this collection-is precisely because of its unclear nature it turns out to be between two poles: on the one hand, it remains an abstract, albeit quite correct intuition of some changes: "there was little religion before, but now there is a lot of it"; on the other, the post-secular often narrows down to Habermas's problematics of "post - secular society". The first trend is typical for a number of articles in this collection, in particular, for the article by Martijn Oosterbaan "Virtual re - evangelization: Brazilian churches, media, and the post - secular city", in which the use of the term "post-secular" - only 2 times-serves either to justify the presence of this article in the collection under consideration, or to justify the use of the term "post-secular". broadcasts of a certain new zeitgeist, in the context of which the described virtual re-evangelization takes place. The second trend is illustrated by the article of the already mentioned Michel Liesenberg, which not only narrows post-secular issues to Habermas's "post-secular society", but literally reduces it to specific theses of Habermas, addressed specifically to liberal-democratic European societies, which, according to the German philosopher, are experiencing a period of acute self-reflexivity, including in relation to religion. Not surprisingly, such a narrowed understanding of the postsecular allows Liesenberg to declare the postsecular a Eurocentric concept, unsuitable for analyzing non-European contexts.

A much more serious problem in connection with the concept of "post-secular" is identified by Bernice Martin in the article " Contemporary Bias: "post-secular" Europe and spirited Latin America". She wonders whether it makes sense to use the concept of "post - secular" to describe societies that have not experienced consistent secularization and that cannot be said to exist in them-if we use the term "post-secular".

page 296
In Charles Taylor's terminology, the "immanent frame" has become the "default position". The experience of Pentecostalism in Latin American countries, where it has found fertile ground due to the specifics of the "enchanted" folk culture, allows Bernice Martin to ask a rhetorical question: are these societies " post-secular or pre-secular, or is this division simply meaningless?" (p. 86). Martin's arguments make us quite objectively doubt the universality of the post-secular approach. However, here we cannot ignore the following fact, which Martin herself missed: since the study of any societies and any contexts comes either from the West or using Western theoretical schemes, the change of Western paradigms and the transition to a post-secular paradigm will inevitably have global consequences, affecting any research of any non-Western contexts. The transition to the post-secular paradigm changes the theoretical lens through which the researcher looks at Latin American societies, even if the latter did not have the experience of consistent secularization.

The authors ' criticism of the post-secular paradigm is not without reason. At a minimum, it indicates the need to take into account the specifics of each specific historical example. However, the objections of Beckford, Dyce and Beaumont, Lisenberg or Martin are hardly sufficient to reject the post-secular paradigm. Twenty or thirty years ago, researchers wrote with such confidence about global secularization, and just ten years ago they rejected this idea with such confidence that to describe today's processes as just a continuation and evolution of the same (in the spirit of Beckford or Dyce and Beaumont) or as a purely ethnocentric problem of some European societies it seems rather strange. This oddity is particularly striking when looking at modern processes from within the Russian, post-Soviet context.

However, despite all the conceptual discussions, there are several very specific and recognized stories related to the post-secular and developed, among other things, by the authors of the collection. In particular, this is the topic of the post-secular turn in social theory, philosophy and theology. In this publication, this subject is only indirectly addressed - with the exception of Habermas ' theory, to which the entire fourth part is devoted-through

page 297
constant references to Charles Taylor, Philippe Blond, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida and others. Only the article "Post-Secularism Spaces" by Gregor McLennan is devoted to a thorough analysis of this turn. In his work, Mclenan quite rightly points out that the postsecular should not be interpreted in the sense of anti - or post-secular, but rather in the sense of further-secular (Mclenan suggests using the prefix infra -, meaning "lower, further", to convey the meaning that he puts in post-secularism).

The next plot that is directly related to the post-secular one, which, in fact, is the most important aspect of the problems under study for the authors of the collection, is an urban plot, this is the problem of the "post-secular city". The key point of reference for most of the authors of the collection is the so-called "spatial turn", which has taken place since the 1990s in a number of disciplines - geography, social theory, anthropology, philology and history. The essence of this spatial turn is to focus attention on space, which is no longer perceived as a simple container of time, as a simple arena for unfolding events and discussions. For the proponents of the spatial turn, space - in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre's ideas-is endowed with its own analytical and explanatory power: hence their increased attention to architecture, urban planning, the arrangement of roads and routes, and local environments as fundamental factors in the organization of everyday life in urban reality. As one of the main theorists of the spatial turn, Edward Soya, points out, there is no social reality that is not located in space. There are no extra-dimensional social processes. Accordingly, the transition to the post-secular should have a specific spatial dimension, and post-secularity should be reflected in the inevitable reconfiguration of space - whether it is the construction of new churches, mosques, or houses of worship for adherents of different religions, or the activation of religious NGOs in disadvantaged areas, etc. That is, the post-secular-and this is one of the most important intuitions of the compilers of this collection-is not only a new stream in theoretical philosophical or theological thought, it is also a process that has a spatial dimension.

page 298
In particular, in the opening article of the collection, Justine Beaumont draws attention to the fact that "the transition from secular to post-secular in the context of public space, public policy, civil society and the use of buildings is carried out precisely in the urban context" (p. 3). This is a valuable observation that indicates a revolution in the understanding of the city among researchers. Indeed, as Kim Noth, Ari Molendyk and Maike de Haardt note in their articles, the city in the Christian context has always been associated with the earthly city of Augustine, with the center of vice, with a place where people are waiting for numerous temptations and even the danger of losing their faith. The same suspicion has also spread to the writings of secularization theorists, for whom urbanization was one of the obvious catalysts for secularization - moving people to cities breaks them off from their roots, from the traditional way of life that is inextricably linked with religion. However, the experience of the modern megalopolis shows the opposite - the possibility of revealing "the sacred and spiritual within the worldly city" (p. 27). Here, the authors point, first of all, to the experience of religious NGOs, to their participation in the life of a modern metropolis (for example, Paul Cloake analyzes the activities of the London Citizens organization that has long attracted the attention of researchers).

Special attention-in the context of the "spatial turn" - is paid to the architectural dimension of the post-secular: how the transition to post-secularity transforms the architecture of the city. This is one of the most interesting topics related to the urban dimension of postsecularity. In particular, the article by Nihan Ozdemir Sonmez explores the history of architectural transformation in Ankara, depending on the religious policy pursued by the authorities. David Martin's article with the characteristic title " Inscribing the general theory of secularization and its key patterns in the architectural space / time of the city: from pre-secular to post-secular?" The article is devoted to detailing the author's ideas on secularization set forth in his well-known work "General Theory of Secularization"2. In the spirit of the "spatial turn", he analyzes how different patterns of secularization are reflected in the architectural appearance of different cities. However, he brings his analysis to the point where the transition to fasting is actually made-

2. Martin D.A. General theory of secularization. L.: Blackwell, 1978.

page 299
a secular city. Here Martin interrupts his presentation, leaving us with only a few valuable but very general considerations. He points out that the transition to the post-secular "is not so easy to understand when looking at a modern city or landscape" (p. 205). Indeed, given the fact that the post-secular is associated - as many authors of the collection, in particular Wilhelm Grab, point out - with non-traditional forms of religiosity, with an elusive and sometimes unspeakable "spirituality", the question of how exactly it can be identified in the architectural landscape of a modern western city becomes particularly important. sharpness. Martin points out that post-secular architecture can hardly be associated with monumental buildings, rather it should be seen in "the use of space, in venues for mass celebrations or collective experiences" (p. 205).

Another subject that is directly related to the post - secular is religiosity in its new forms. Post-secular religiosity, according to Kim Knott, is "the re-sacralization or return of the religious (often couched in the language of 'spirituality'), which takes seriously such secular values as the importance of the human self, human prosperity and human destiny, the values of diversity, choice and freedom" (p. 21). This point is most thoroughly discussed by Wilhelm Grab in his article "The Transformation of Religious Culture in Modern Societies: from Secularization to post-secularism", which defines post-secularism as the transformation of religion "into a dimension of personal experience and beliefs that are not limited to religious institutions and communities" (p. 114). This is an interesting point, which shows that the post-secular-quite in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn's ideas-can be described as a new paradigm replacing the old one: the post-secular paradigm replaces the paradigm of secularization and allows you to see some well-known facts in a completely new light. Within the framework of the secularization paradigm, such a transformation of religion, described since the 1960s, has traditionally been interpreted as the decline of religion, as a weakening of its social significance, and as a transition stage to its gradual marginalization.3 Sight

3. In fact, this is exactly how these processes are interpreted by the remaining supporters of the secularization paradigm, in particular, Steve Bruce. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. P. 75 - 105.

page 300
looking at these processes through the prism of post-secular theory allows us to see them in a completely different light.

Finally, the last subject related to the post-secular and considered in this collection is the Habermas-Rawls problem of "post-secular society" and "public reason". The fourth part of the collection contains five articles on this topic. The authors focus on the dispute between the so-called "inclusivists" and "exclusivists" (p. 343).The former advocate the permissibility of religious arguments in public discussion, while the latter advocate the inadmissibility, arguing that the dialogue should be conducted in purely secular categories. Despite the fact that the" inclusivists " have recently prevailed quantitatively, the authors of the collection almost unanimously prove the groundlessness and internal inconsistency of the latter's positions: as Anke Schuster shows, in particular, in his article "Public Reason and Inclusivism as pseudo - inclusivism" (p. 343-355), "inclusivists" so nuance the presence of religious justifications in public space that these justifications, in fact, cease to differ from their secular counterparts.

Overall, the collection is a very valuable contribution to the discussion of the "post-secular". The problems raised in it will be developed in further publications on this topic, which we will definitely reflect on the pages of our magazine.

page 301

Permanent link to this publication: