By Telos Press · Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World
The Seventh Annual Telos Conference
February 16-17, 2013
New York City
The 21st century has been marked by both events and reflections that have explicitly challenged the long-standing liberal project of maintaining a separation between religion and politics. Not only have political conflicts become inseparable from theological and metaphysical considerations, but standard liberal claims of value-neutrality have been undermined by insights into the theological presuppositions of secular institutions. The goal of the 2013 Telos Conference will be to investigate the changing relationship between religion and politics. Possible topics include secularization and the “post-secular” turn; the theological foundations of political systems such as liberalism, socialism, and fascism; political theology; religion and the public sphere; separation of church and state; new civil forms of religious practice; the politics of religious pluralism; myth and sovereignty; theology and modernity; religion and political values; theocracy and religious law.
Please send short cv, paper title, and a 200-word abstract for a 15-minute presentation to David Pan (dtpan@uci.edu) with “2013 Telos Conference” in subject line by October 15, 2012.
By Telos Press · Wednesday, August 1, 2012 Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios, now available for the first time in English translation. Pre-order your copy at the Telos Press website and save 10% off the cover price.
The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios
by Ernst Jünger
 Translated by Thomas Friese
Edited by Russell A. Berman
With an introduction by Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman
Release date: September 1
The 1938 version of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios must be considered a key text in the famous German writer’s sprawling oeuvre. In this volume, which bears comparison to the Denkbilder of the Frankfurt School, Jünger assembles sixty-three short, often surrealistic prose pieces—accounts of dreams, nature observations, biographical vignettes, and critical reflections on culture and society—providing, as he puts it, “small models of another way of seeing things.” Here Jünger experiments with a new method of observation and thinking, uniting lucid and precise observation with the unconstrained receptivity of dreams.
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By Telos Press · Friday, June 29, 2012 Jean Lassègue reviews Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, now available in English translation from Telos Press.
 The subject of Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s book is the concept of multiculturalism and how it relates to organized religions conceived as purveyors of norms in the public sphere. If, in order to justify this approach, one were to draw a comparison with the famous analytical framework conceived by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, which demonstrated that as from the second half of the 19th century, the economy had striven to absorb society instead of being governed by it, one might ask oneself if the question today is not whether religions are attempting the same endeavor, beyond the secular episode which slowly took shape in Europe until it prevailed in the 20th century, by trying to reverse society’s independence from any kind of external metaphysical foundation seeking to encompass it. From this standpoint, the examination of the relationships between Islam and multiculturalism takes up a significant part of the book, precisely because Islam is the only religion that to this day views its sphere of action as encompassing society and as including a proselytic component, an outlook which Christianity and Buddhism would (maybe temporarily) seem to have renounced. One can therefore readily understand the author’s chosen angle of approach, which bears for the most part on the place that should be afforded to organized religions, and especially to Islam, in the public sphere of liberal democracies at the highly specific point in their history where collective debate has progressively crystallized around the question of multiculturalism.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, June 13, 2012 Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt’s The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, now available from Telos Press, explores the fundamental conceptions and political implications of culturalism and multiculturalism. “Multiculturalism” is a term that is used often in mainstream discourse, although its meaning usually goes unquestioned or unchallenged. For Eriksen and Stjernfelt, multiculturalism is either “soft” or “hard.” Soft multiculturalism allows the individual to express his or her cultural identity: it is “a system where the individual can choose to live in whatever way she or he wishes.” Hard multiculturalism, however, describes a community that uses legal and social tools to reproduce and regulate its own values; moreover, “the community may even mobilize its own police force and legal system in order to demand, to some extent or another, the conformity of individuals.”
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By Telos Press · Thursday, May 17, 2012 Congratulations to Adrian Pabst, one of our Telos editorial associates, on the publication of his new book, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy, published by Eerdmans with the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, as part of their Interventions series.
 “This book does nothing less than to set new standards in combining philosophical with political theology. Pabst’s argument about rationality has the potential to change debates in philosophy, politics, and religion.” (from the foreword by John Milbank)
This comprehensive and detailed study of individuation reveals the theological nature of metaphysics. Adrian Pabst argues that ancient and modern conceptions of “being”—or individual substance—fail to account for the ontological relations that bind beings to each other and to God, their source. On the basis of a genealogical account of rival theories of creation and individuation from Plato to “postmodernism,” Pabst proposes that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy fulfills and surpasses all other ontologies and conceptions of individuality.
Please visit the Centre of Theology and Philosophy website for ordering information.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, May 9, 2012 On Tuesday, June 5, at 7pm, St. Mark’s Bookshop and Telos Press Publishing will present a reading and discussion with Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt about their new book The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism. The discussion will be hosted by Russell Berman and Tim Luke. The reading will take place at St. Mark’s Bookshop, located at 31 Third Avenue, between 8th and 9th Streets, in New York City. This is a free event. For directions and additional information about St. Mark’s Bookshop, please visit their website. Purchase your copy of The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism here.
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