prayer, subjectivity, and politicsdisappearance of intermediary social bodies.^7 My suggestion, in this
study, is that the impression and expectation — in the construction of
religion as the “negative other” of secular modernity — that religion is
inherently violent has to do with a peculiar configuration of religion
as a concept and phenomenon (with its conjoining understanding of
human subjectivity) which has had negative consequences not only for
a political view of religion but also in terms of different religious self-
perceptions. To escape from this cul-de-sac we need to recover a phil-
osophical and theological sense for the embodied and institutional
dimension of religion. My angle of approach to this will be to investi-
gate the relationship between prayer — as a specific religious practice
or phenomenon — and subjectivity and transcendence.
How to Pray
My claim above is that one of the arguments that is quite often heard
in the political-philosophical debate from partisans of secular moder-
nity against religious pretensions within the public sphere is that any
such claims would amount to a political threat against a pluralistic
society. If God has spoken and thus made the divine will clear, there
is no space for compromises between differing views and values, since
these pretensions for universality not only are guaranteed by an au-
thority but by Authority as such. The critical objection against reli-
gious claims for universality or political authority springs from the
suspicion that these imply a kind of short circuit between the perspec-
tive of the believer and universality as such. While I would not deny
that such suspicions sometimes are right — i.e. there are examples of
people who mistake their opinion for the very voice of God — I never-
theless would contend that from a theological perspective such claims
could be shown to be an example of ideology or bad faith. There are
good theological reasons for the insight that all claims for knowl-
edge — political or otherwise — are provisional and therefore open to
revision. I will give an example here that concerns the relationship
- Cf. the discussion in Shmuel N. Eistenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and
Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.