Of miracles and special effects

Abstract

Though the phenomenon of religion might seem to have become obsolete in the recent intellectual and political history of ‘secular’ modernity, in late twentieth and early twenty-first century liberal-democratic states and worldwide, it has resurfaced with an unprecedented — and unanticipated — force. This ‘return of the religious’² at a geopolitical scale conflicts with the self-interpretation of modern states and their citizens. The emergence of a supposedly enlightened and increasingly differentiated public sphere had gone hand in hand with the formulation of ideals of identity and self-determination, individual autonomy and universalist cosmopolitanism, both of which seem at odds with the heteronomy and particularism — the authoritarianism or even the violence — commonly ascribed to religious doctrine and its practices.³