The Frankfurt School On Religion

With this collection of essays on the topic of religion by major figures in the Frankfurt school, Eduardo Mendieta adds substantially to the current debate on the religious turn in the academy because these texts offer at least two important reminders concerning the relation of religion and culture. The first is their reciprocal relationship. Religion is always enculturated and culture, in turn, reflects—even shapes—religious convictions and traditions. The second reminder is that the present debate concerning culture and religion, if it is to overcome dualistic oppositions in speaking to a common human experience, is essentially about reason. Mendieta addresses the first aspect, the reciprocal relationship of religion and culture, in his clear and concise introductory essay on the origins and research aims of the Frankfurt school and its substantial critique of modernity and the cultural effects of scientific positivism. Contrary to similar postmodern criticisms of modernity, however, the cultural critics of the Frankfurt school already recognized the limitations of cultural materialism and the importance of culture as “mediator between the material and the mental, between the economic and the socio-political” (5). It may astonish some readers to find that the Frankfurt school on the whole seeks to recover religion for Marxism, not least because thinkers like Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer recognize the eschatological religious dimension of Marx's own thought.

Epistemology · Materialism · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Positivism · Postmodernism · Postmodernity · Reciprocal · Relation (database) · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies