Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political

This book exhibits the wisdom and breadth of Calvin Schrag’s papers in the philosophy of religion and ethics through the many years in which he has remarkably combined wide-ranging scholarship, phenomenological astuteness, and insight into normative questions.

This collection is an invaluable addition to the library of continental philosophy in America, a superb selection of the most important essays on religion, ethics and politics by Calvin Schrag, a groundbreaking thinker and honored teacher who has help shape the landscape of our discipline. Transversality, radical reflection, communicative hermeneutics, the postmodern self, the God-book–it’s all here, a veritable prism in which every important movement in continental philosophy can be seen in the light of Schrag’s discerning philosophy of the ‘fitting response’ from which we have all learned so much.

Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political also displays the philosophical virtues that Schrag’s readers have come to expect of his writing. Consisting primarily of previously published essays, this book offers a rich introduction to some of Schrag’s key ideas: the notion of “transversality,” “the ethic of the fitting response,” and “postnational identity.” Praise is due to Michael R. Paradiso-Michau for his editorial work in so carefully selecting the essays that are included in this volume. These essays span much of Schrag’s career and, accordingly, do a nice job of showing how Schrag’s ideas have importantly remained consistent in some general ways and yet changed and developed in other ways. . . .In the end, this is a book worth reading and taking seriously. It is clearly written, well argued, and attentive to persistent questions in religious, ethical, and political existence. Paradiso-Michau has done philosophy a service by bringing together these valuable essays by an important philosopher