Cultural and Religious Pluralism in the Age of Imaginaries

In recent debates within philosophy, religious studies, social sciences and political theory, the “secular age” is being rethought as a time in which the secular and the religious—as well as the realms of experience and imagination they stand for, i.e., immanence and transcendence—mutually inform and transform each other. This complex condition is analyzed as a cultural and religious pluralism of imaginaries, marking the so-called “end of the grand narratives”. Against the stable and compelling ideologies and worldview systems, a world of radical difference and “super-diversity” is opened up, in which the meaning of life and the sense of the world are addressed in a permanent play of hybrid, temporal, and unstable imaginaries.

In this Special Issue, seven scholars contribute to the important and urgent field of philosophical and political research on pluralism, whether initiated and carried out in the French context, the German context, the South American context, the Indian context, or the Anglo-Saxon context. In the seven articles, theories of pluralism in relation to imagination are further developed, in the cross-over area between secularity and religion. For further information, we refer to the editorial below.

Prof. Dr. Laurens ten Kate
Mr. Bram van Boxtel
Guest Editors