Post-Secular Consensus? On the Munich-dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger

Abstract

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas met in Munich on the 19th of January 2004 to discuss the topic "The Pre-political Moral Foundations of a Free State." However, in the aftermath of the papers, another and more implicit question has been given more attention; the papers lend themselves to a reading in connection with the on-going discussion of the relationship between religion and social science. In this article I present a reading of the two papers, based on their portrayal of the relationship between the religious and secular descriptions of reality. Furthermore, I shall look more closely at the two speakers' views on what unites the world, as these two themes are intrinsically linked.