jonna bornemark & hans ruinphilosophical development initiated by Husserl already at the outset
also sought to free new avenues for thinking the religious and its
relation to the philosophical. Both in the work of Max Scheler and in
Edith Stein, as well as in the great efforts of Martin Heidegger in his
early years to establish a critical dialogue with Lutheran theology and
its Pauline roots on the basis of his analytic of facticity, we can see how
this original impetus led to developments which have transformed the
way we can think about the religious and its reciprocal relation to
philosophy, in ways which still remain to be fully articulated.
The special relation between phenomenology and religion was
highlighted and brought into focus in more recent times through a
critical book published by Dominique Janicaud in 1991, The theological
turn of French phenomenology^3. Referring to the phenomenological work
of, notably, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry and Emmanuel Levinas,
Janicaud argued that contemporary French phenomenology in its
move toward the phenomenon of the inapparent was about to abandon
the methodological atheism that he saw as a defining characteristic of
its original ethos. Some years later Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo
organized a symposium around the question of religion which led to
the publication On religion, which in itself contributed greatly to the
renewed interest in religious and theological concerns from the point
of view of phenomenological and deconstructive analyses, notably in
the work of John Caputo and Hent de Vries, among others.^4 In the
decade following this publication there has been a rise of interest in
the constellation “phenomenology and religion”, from the point of
view both of philosophers and of theologians and religious scholars.
In May 2008 the philosophy department at Södertörn University
in Stockholm hosted an international conference on the theme “New
Frontiers: Phenomenology and Religion.” On one level its purpose
was to bring together scholars from all of these fields to survey the
present interconnectedness of phenomenology, post-phenomenology
(deconstruction), and theology around the understanding of the
- Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie français, Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat,
1991; Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard
G. Prusak, et al., New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. - La religion, Paris: Seuil, 1996.