This new book, with its cover photo of the two intellectual eminences talking to each other, seems to offer the promise of a dialogue, debates, or even battle between reason and faith. But this “debate” more closely resembles an American presidential “debate” than a true Parliamentary or forensic debate. Instead of an exchange of views, dialogue, cross-examination, or rebuttal, we have merely two set pieces about reason and religion which only very rarely even mention the other thinker. The reader is left to imagine what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would say about Jürgen Habermas or what Habermas would say about Ratzinger…
James Bernard Murphy Subscribe
James Bernard Murphy is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and is the author of The Philosophy of Positive Law: Foundations of Jurisprudence
Fides et Ratio
In his recent addresses to the British Parliament and to the German Bundestag, Pope Benedict XVI, attempts to build a bridge between the discourse of secular politics and Christian faith. He calls for a dialogue between “the world of secular rationality” and the world of “religious belief”. Benedict identifies two main threats to this dialogue: ideological distortions of secular reason and religious fundamentalism. He argues that a proper dialogue between faith and reason can “purify” both by helping us to avoid ideological blindness and religious fanaticism. How to span the realms of Christian faith and secular reason? Benedict builds his…
