RT Article
T1 Schleiermacher’s Speeches and the Modern Critique of Religion
JF Religions
VO 15
IS 3
A1 Vander Schel, Kevin M. 1979-
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1882285425
AB Friedrich Schleiermacher is often credited with playing a foundational role in the development of the modern concept of religion. His epoch-making Speeches on religion, published in 1799 amidst the widespread social and intellectual upheaval of the Sattelzeit, present a novel description of religious feeling and religious communication, which mark a turning away from the rationalistic treatments of religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which served as both inspiration and foil for scholars of religion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This essay suggests a reading of Schleiermacher’s Speeches that is organized around two interrelated claims. First, the text does not proceed as speculative philosophical treatise aiming to establish an overarching theory of religion but as a critical dialogue that inquires into the distinctive particularity of religion and religious expression. Second, religious piety, as depicted in the Speeches, is not found in the isolated inwardness of individual experience but in coordinated tension with sociality, in communications of religious feeling that are bound together with a living apprehension of the world. On this account, religion for Schleiermacher, though rooted in feeling and self-consciousness, is nonetheless no private affair; it is realized within the developing complex of social and historical living.
K1 Religious Communication
K1 Particularity
K1 Intuition
K1 feeling
K1 Characterization
K1 Critique
K1 German Romanticism
K1 Schleiermacher
DO 10.3390/rel15030311