prayer, subjectivity, and politicswhat is said but also how it is said and also the relation between “the
what” and “the how.” The goal for religion is then not apodictic
knowledge but doxology. Biblical religion becomes, instead, a protest
against all attempts to usurp universality. It opens up a critical distance
between its own particular position and truth or universality as such
without giving up all claims to universality as such.
The Return of Religion to Politics
Prayer is but one of many religious phenomena that implicates a cer-
tain kind of subjectivity that might draw attention to the embodiment
of religion and also the reflexive awareness of the contextual nature of
its claims for truth and universality. It would also be possible to move
into discussions of other parts of the liturgy, and also about works of
charity, and so on, but I hope that it might be accepted that for the
scope of this paper I will limit my focus on the implications of a prayer-
ful religious subjectivity to a final, and very brief, discussion about the
relationship between religion and politics.
The embodied and contextual nature of prayer implies a subjectiv-
ity that does not claim to master reality by having a world-picture that
legitimates its owner to disown other, conflicting ways of being in the
world. The prayerful attitude does not short-circuit the relationship
between God and the human being so that any religious person or
group could so to speak hide beneath revelation disregarding their
own responsibility of, in theory and practice, interpreting this revela-
tion. Instead, any particular way of living as a disciple of this divine
revelation must in a prayerful and therefore also critical vigilance be
aware of the limits of any such particular path — nevertheless without
giving up any public truth-claims as such. In the embodied mediation
of prayer lies a different way of conceiving the relation between reli-
gion and politics than in the quite simple differentiation of secular
modernity between private and public. The British theologian John
Milbank puts forward the need for a more complex understanding of
space that breaks with the illusion of being able to differentiate be-
tween private and public as two distinctive spheres: