The Religious Question Put to the Test of Global Thought

Religion, as an anthropological, spiritual, and philosophical phenomenon, has traversed all civilizations. It has been examined, interpreted, criticized—and at times radically deconstructed—by the major intellectual traditions, whether Western, Chinese, Indian, or Islamic. From Spinoza to Kant, from al-Ghazālī to Ibn Khaldūn, from Confucianism to Zen Buddhism, religion has been understood in turn as a relation to the world, a social structure, a moral foundation, or a path of wisdom.

Within this vast legacy, Jacques Derrida’s project—most notably his notion of a “religion without religion”—appears as a singular and highly influential intervention, yet one that is also strikingly unmoored. It tends to overlook, or at least to marginalize, what these diverse traditions, despite their profound differences, have consistently regarded as fundamental: the relation to the cosmos, to the human community, and to the values of truth, goodness, and justice. It is this lack of grounding that we propose to examine first, by situating Derrida’s position in dialogue with the major philosophical and spiritual traditions of the world. This initial inquiry will serve as the point of departure for a broader reflection on religion and the religious in the contemporary world.

This text does not seek to elaborate a doctrine of religion, nor to offer a systematic theory. It should rather be read as an exploratory essay—an outline of reflection intended to reopen questions too often frozen between dogmatism and relativism. To think religion in the twenty-first century is not to impose definitive answers, but to identify fault lines, impasses, and possibilities, starting from our own historical situation.

It is in this spirit that we take Derrida’s work as a starting point—not in order to engage in polemics, but because his thought constitutes a revealing limit case in contemporary philosophy of religion. Derrida himself insisted that deconstruction is neither a destruction nor a rejection of tradition, but a vigilant critique of all claims to closure. To take seriously his conception of a “religion without religion,” of faith without dogma and ethics without ultimate foundation, is therefore to ask how far a reflection on religion can go when it pushes to the extreme the demands of openness, hospitality, and the suspension of judgment.

Our approach is thus not directed against Derrida, but proceeds from his work. The aim is to test the fecundity and the limits of his theses when they are confronted with the historical, cosmological, and communal density of concrete religious traditions. The guiding hypothesis of this inquiry is that, when carried to its extreme, a conception of religion detached from any form of anchoring risks turning into abstraction—at the cost of weakening our relation to the shared world, to collective memory, and to the orienting values of truth, goodness, and justice.

This critical moment has meaning only insofar as it prepares a second, explicitly constructive gesture. Against the double temptation of postmodern dissolution and rigid identity-based restoration, we seek to think religion not as a closed system nor as a purely interior disposition, but as a living human task—one that is historically situated, traversed by inherited meanings, and oriented toward a renewed search for sense, justice, and truth.

What is at stake is neither the restoration of a lost religious authority nor the construction of a new universal synthesis. The question is rather how to approach religion at a human scale, under the symbolic, political, and spiritual conditions of the twenty-first century. It is in this spirit of responsible exploration—aware of its limits, attentive to traditions without submission to them, critical without retreating into emptiness—that the reflection developed in the following pages takes shape.

Part One

The Limits of Derrida’s Position in Light of Global Philosophical Heritages

I. Cosmos and Religion: A Universal Constant Overlooked

From Aristotle’s First Philosophy to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, religious thought has always been intertwined with cosmology. Spinoza unifies God and Nature within a single rational order, while Kant, even as he limits metaphysics, preserves the idea of God as a regulative principle. In Islam, al-Ghazālī and Averroes each sought, in their own way, to articulate revelation with knowledge of the world; Ibn Khaldūn, for his part, anchors religion within a concrete historical sociology of human societies. In Asia, Taoism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Zen all articulate spirituality in relation to a cosmic order.

This articulation between religion and cosmos is also found in countless traditions beyond the classical canon. Traditional African religions, for example, never dissociate the sacred from the natural world: land, rivers, and ancestors function as living vectors of meaning and relation. Among Indigenous peoples of the Americas or Oceania, cosmology does not separate human beings from the world, but situates them within a web of ritual, mythical, and ecological interdependencies. The “Dreamtime” of Australian Aboriginal peoples, or the life cycles associated with Andean Pachamama, assign religion a function of vital continuity with the world. These traditions do not posit a transcendent deity; yet they testify to an intense cosmic spirituality, in which belonging precedes belief.

By rejecting any reference to transcendence or to a shared origin, Derrida seeks to free religious thought from its dogmatic pretensions. Yet this gesture, however fruitful in its critical intention, leads to a paradoxical consequence: it dissociates the human being from what has constituted, from the very beginning, an essential dimension of human experience—religion as a vector of relation, memory, and transmission. In attempting to think a “religion without religion,” Derrida isolates the subject within a perpetual present, severed both from the historical depth of traditions and from the human communities that have carried them. He disconnects human beings from the historical fabric within which narratives, symbols, rites, and institutions have been woven—elements that, whether we acknowledge it or not, continue to structure our collective consciousness.

This presentism, characteristic of modern systems of thought and intensified by certain forms of deconstruction, is profoundly destructive. For it denies human beings their historical and symbolic depth; it reduces them to a floating subjectivity, exposed to market flows, to the injunctions of the moment, to fleeting seductions. By cutting humanity off from its temporal inscription, by denying that religion has been an essential mode of being-in-the-world, such thinking produces an anthropological void—an oblivion of what precedes us and binds us together. Yet such amnesia does not open onto freedom; it opens onto drift. The task of thinking religion today cannot be satisfied with such erasure. On the contrary, it must recover the thread of a historical responsibility—assumed, critical, yet alive.

II. Hospitality Without a World: The Impasse of a “Religion Without Religion”

Derrida’s proposal of a “religion without religion” rests on a commendable intention: to free religious experience from dogmatic closure, institutional authority, and normatively defined transcendent ends. His aim is to preserve a certain dimension of the religious call—faith, expectation, openness to the other—while rejecting the traditional religious apparatus, which he regards as authoritarian and exclusionary.

It is within this framework that he develops the notion of unconditional hospitality. This hospitality consists in welcoming the other absolutely, without prior conditions, without demands of identity or reciprocity, in a gesture of total openness. It is conceived as a radical and infinite ethical ideal, opposed to all forms of identity-based or communitarian logic. Such hospitality claims to be not only without borders, but also without anchorage.

Yet this posture, however appealing in its conceptual purity, reveals a major contradiction. Genuine hospitality is never abstract. It presupposes a world of welcome: a shared space, minimal values, a language, a culture, a temporality. To be hospitable is not merely to receive the other in a passive or indefinite manner; it is to make room for them within a place that already has a history, a form, and a meaning. It is to invite the other to share—materially or symbolically—what one is and what one has.

By insisting on unconditional hospitality, Derrida precisely effaces what makes hospitality possible in the first place: the inscription of individuals within a history, a tradition, and a community. This dissociation of the human being from historical rootedness is characteristic of a radical presentism, typical of late modernity, which isolates the individual while claiming to liberate them. Such “freedom,” severed from all bonds, ultimately becomes a form of confinement. Exacerbated individualism does not produce openness but self-sufficiency: the subject becomes the measure of all things, even when speaking in the name of ethics or welcome.

This paradox is central. What presents itself as infinite hospitality ultimately reveals itself as withdrawal without alterity. A truly unconditional hospitality—that is, one without bonds, without a framework, without exchange—is not hospitality at all; it is an empty abstraction, a noble name given to indifference or solitude. There can be no hospitality without a world to offer, however open, fragile, or unfinished that world may be. In this respect, Derrida’s thought, under the guise of emancipation, disembodies the human experience of relation and memory, and renders ineffective any attempt to rethink religion as a space of encounter and responsibility.

III. Suspended Judgment: The Erasure of Good and Evil

Within Derrida’s framework, the notions of the Good, Evil, and the Just can never be posited as absolutes, nor even stabilized within a determinate framework. The Good is undecidable, Justice always deferred, Evil often left unnamed. His aim is to avoid all forms of moral dogmatism, all claims to ultimate judgment. Consistent with the overall logic of deconstruction, this stance seeks to preserve ethical openness, vigilance, and perpetual self-questioning.

Yet such a position, while retaining undeniable theoretical interest, leads in practice to a troubling aporia. By indefinitely suspending judgment, it effectively returns us to a kind of primordial chaos, in which nothing can be clearly discerned, evaluated, or named. But the human world is never without order. Even the most fragmented societies invent codes, rules, and norms to articulate what is just or unjust, tolerable or condemnable.

The central question, therefore, is not whether all moral reference points should be abolished in order to avoid arbitrariness, but how one moves from the order within which one lives toward an order yet to be constructed—for one never begins from nothing. In other words, how ethical principles can be articulated within concrete historical situations, without yielding either to absolute relativism or to moral absolutism. From this perspective, Derrida’s suspension of judgment appears less as an ethical rigor than as a form of abdication—one that, in certain contexts, can even turn into betrayal.

For the relation to the Good, Evil, and the Just is not an optional abstraction; it belongs to the human condition itself. Human beings are traversed by moral conflicts, trials of discernment, and responsibilities toward others and toward the world. The struggle for justice, resistance to evil, and the pursuit of the good are constitutive dynamics of human life. To destabilize them in the name of radical undecidability is to weaken humanity’s very capacity to take a stand, to commit, and to act responsibly.

So-called “primary” religious traditions offer a valuable counterpoint to our contemporary situation. Among the Maasai, the Dogon, the Ainu of Japan, or Andean peoples, good and evil are not abstract categories; they are bound to the balance between the living, the dead, the land, and the spirits. Truth is not a matter of demonstration, but of harmony to be preserved. Far from dogmatic, these approaches remind us that ethics can function as an ecology of relations. In the face of present-day fragmentation, they invite us to rethink not only what we believe, but how we inhabit the world together.

IV. Faith Without Anchoring: The Undecidable Promise

In Faith and Knowledge (1996), Jacques Derrida attempts to conceptualize a form of faith detached from traditional religious affiliations. He defines faith as an originary attitude of trust, a radical availability to the other and to the future, prior to any institution, dogma, or established knowledge. As he writes:

“There is faith, there must be faith: trust, credit, fidelity, promise, commitment, oath […] before all knowledge, all certainty.”

For Derrida, this faith—also described as a “messianic structure”—refers to no determinate content. It is an open expectation, a relation to the future without program, an infinite hospitality toward what is to come, whatever may arrive, even in complete uncertainty. He thus speaks of a “messianicity without messianism”: the expectation of a Messiah without any messianic figure.

This intuition must be acknowledged as having genuine philosophical force. It allows us to think faith not primarily as adherence to doctrine, but as an existential experience. One may rightly concede that faith, so conceived, is not necessarily tied to religion in its institutional or doctrinal sense. It belongs to the human condition as a mode of openness to the other, an initial trust, a wager on speech, promise, and relation.

Yet this conception of faith, however fruitful at the phenomenological level, remains fundamentally insufficient. Faith cannot be reduced to a psychological attitude or an interior disposition. It is not merely an ethical posture of availability. Faith presupposes an order of the world—a cosmic, human, and symbolic coherence—to which one may adhere or against which one may struggle. There is faith in something, faith in someone, faith in an order, a truth, an embodied promise. A faith without object, without content, without inscription gradually empties itself of force and meaning.

Thus, where Derrida seeks to preserve indeterminacy in order to avoid dogmatic closure, he runs the opposite risk: that of dissolving faith into abstraction, uprooting it to the point of rendering it inoperative. Living faith, by contrast, presupposes a dynamic relation to an object, a horizon, a truth—not fixed or immutable, but sufficiently substantial to sustain commitment, fidelity, and resistance to forgetting and indifference.

Here again, Derrida’s thought tends to evacuate an essential dimension: faith as a historical, personal, and collective process, bound to successive objects—convictions, causes, persons, ideals—that nourish its vitality. Individual history, like human history as a whole, is woven from acts of faith, fidelities and ruptures, continuities and reversals. These acts are bound and unbound according to contexts, experiences, and trials, but they are never empty. They always attach themselves to something that justifies, orients, and sometimes transcends them.

Without such successive objects—whether religious, political, philosophical, artistic, or amorous—faith is nothing. It becomes pure impulse without direction, promise without an addressee, trust without a world. This is not how human beings live, think, or hope. They believe in something, for something, with someone. Faith is not suspended in a void; it is embodied, adaptive, and historical. It is reconfigured, displaced, reformed—but it does not dissolve into indeterminacy.

By obscuring this dimension, Derrida ultimately proposes an abstract, almost evanescent conception of faith, one that fails its own anthropological vocation: to bind human beings to one another through shared objects of meaning, narratives, symbols, and institutions. The real question, then, is not “must we believe without knowing?”, but rather: what do we do with the objects of our faith? What do they say about us? What do we want to make of them? And how might they help—or fail—to bring us inner peace?

Boxed Texts

1 — “Religion without Religion”

(Structural faith prior to any positive religion)

“This ‘fiduciary’ bond … ‘would precede any determinate community, any positive religion, any onto-anthropo-theological horizon.’”

Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Thierry Marchaisse, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1996, p. 26.

2 — “Unconditional Hospitality”

“Absolute hospitality requires that I open my home … without asking for reciprocity … or even for a name.”

Jacques Derrida, “Welcoming the Foreigner…,” Écarts d’identité, no. 84/85, March–June 1998, pp. 4–5.

3 — Faith as a “Messianic Structure”

(Messianicity / the coming of the other)

“What we here call the messianic: the coming of the other … the singularity of the arrivant as justice.”

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1993, p. 48.

Conclusion of the First Part

A Limit-Thought of Religion

Jacques Derrida’s philosophy may be read as a radical attempt to think religion at its limit—that is, stripped of all stable content, and severed from historical, communal, or cosmological reference. This philosophical gesture, fully consistent with the project of deconstruction, leads to a religion without dogma, a faith without object, and an ethics without anchoring. Derrida seeks to preserve the infinite openness of responsibility; yet when pushed to its extreme, this openness turns against itself.

Four major criticisms may thus be formulated.

First, Derrida dissociates the human being from history. By breaking with tradition, transmission, and symbolic memory, he situates the human subject within a present devoid of depth, where religion becomes little more than a linguistic effect, severed from any real bond. Far from emancipatory, such presentism results in uprooting.

Second, he eludes the necessity of ethical struggle. By indefinitely deferring moral judgment, he renders impossible any concrete stance with regard to the Good, Evil, or Justice. Yet ethics is struggle, discernment, and embodied responsibility. To suspend judgment, in certain circumstances, amounts to betraying the demands of reality.

Third, he denies the human being’s inscription within a cosmic and human order. Across civilizations, religion has first and foremost been a way of situating oneself within an ordered world—of seeking one’s place, meaning, and orientation within it. By refusing all forms of order, Derrida’s thought leaves the human being suspended, without ground or horizon.

Finally, he empties faith of its substance. Conceived as mere availability to the other or to the future, faith becomes a purely formal gesture. Yet there is no faith without an object: one always believes in something. Human history is made of such oriented, embodied acts of faith, articulated around causes, promises, and truths.

Thus, while Derrida opens valuable critical paths for desacralizing religion and avoiding its authoritarian distortions, he ultimately fails to think religion as a living human task—that is, as relation, orientation, and transmission. To think religion today requires not the erasure of its content, but a renewed interrogation of its depth, reconnecting it to our history, our world, and our responsibilities.

Starting from this critique of Derrida, we may, by a movement of reversal, define what religion has historically been, and what it is in principle: a relation to the cosmos; a position with regard to the Good, Evil, Truth, and Justice; an object for faith; and, finally, an anchoring in history.

Part Two

Thinking Religion Today: Humanity, Community, and Meaning

Introduction — Religion as a Task of Thought

Before opening a positive perspective on religion today, it is necessary to situate our reflection within the contemporary debate, which is deeply polarized between two dominant—often antagonistic, yet equally reductive—positions.

The first pole is that of dilution or negation. It is found in certain postmodern philosophies (such as Derrida’s), but also in technocratic rationalism and in individualistic forms of contemporary spirituality. Here, religion is reduced to a minimal subjective experience, detached from the world, from rites, traditions, and shared forms of the sacred. This critical gesture, while once emancipatory, often leads to an evacuation of meaning, in which faith becomes undecidable, ethics suspended, and memory erased.

The second pole is that of rigid restoration. Faced with the loss of reference points, others advocate a return to traditional religious forms in their most literal and inflexible expressions, as though answers from the past could be imposed unchanged upon the present. This stance refuses to engage with the transformations of the modern world—pluralism, autonomy, equality—and tends to essentialize traditions, opposing them to one another within an identity-driven logic that is sometimes exclusionary or violent.

Yet these two tendencies—postmodern abstraction and authoritarian restoration—share the same anthropological blindness: both disregard the human being as situated within history. They forget that the human condition is not a concept or a dogma, but a trajectory, composed of ruptures and fidelities, losses and renewals, from the earliest foundational experiences—now inaccessible to us—through to our technocratic, economistic, and globalized present. Human beings are creatures of passage and memory, always inscribed within an эпох, yet constantly traversed by inheritances, symbols, and calls.

What humanity may have gained most decisively today, through political struggles, advances in knowledge, and cultural exchanges, is perhaps the possibility—still imperfect, yet real—of a reflective vantage point over its own history. A reflexive consciousness capable of rereading past forms, interrogating beliefs, assessing their effects, and assuming responsibility before time itself. It is this perspective that must be mobilized in order to rethink religion anew—not in order to return backward, nor to erase, but to discern, to rearticulate, and to remember in a living way.

It is along this path that we now seek to proceed.

Having examined the critical impasses produced by Derridean deconstruction—the dilution of faith, the suspension of judgment, the forgetting of the shared world—it becomes possible to initiate a different gesture: no longer critical but constructive, no longer withdrawal but engagement. The task is not to restore a lost religious authority, nor to erect a new dogmatic system. Rather, it is to pose the question of religion at a human scale, under the historical, symbolic, and spiritual conditions of the twenty-first century.

From this perspective, our reflection will be organized around three essential questions:

What should be done with religious traditions? Should they be preserved, reformed, or transcended? What, if anything, is to be saved—and how?

How should the relation between individual and community be articulated today? Is it possible to believe alone? What does it mean, now, to transmit, to share, to inherit?

What responses are possible today to the major questions posed by religions? The Good and Evil, justice, the sacred, transcendence—how can these be addressed without yielding either to relativism or to dogmatism?

These questions do not call for closed systems or immediate certainties. They require an attitude of spiritual responsibility—one that assumes inheritance without being confined by it, that seeks meaning without forcing its evidence, and that speaks in the name of the human, in all its fragility, plurality, and freedom.

I. What Should Be Done with Religious Traditions?

The Past as a Constitutive Dimension of Our Humanity

The first question that arises when one attempts to think religion today concerns inheritance. What should be done with this multifaceted religious past—at times sacralized, at times rejected, often misunderstood or misinterpreted? Should it be preserved, reinterpreted, transcended? Can it still serve as a resource, without yielding to nostalgia or to the illusion of a return to the past?

For this religious past is not behind us. It is present within us—sometimes in a living and conscious way, through practices, commitments, and convictions; sometimes in a diffuse, unconscious, almost passive manner. It is not found only in museums, libraries, or sacred texts. It is inscribed in our language, in our moral references, in the calendars we use, the rites we repeat, the festivals we celebrate, even when these appear purely cultural or social. It inhabits everyday gestures, formulas, silences, and collective emotions. It may even dwell, in a strong sense, within our symbolic memory—our cultural DNA.

To forget or erase this would not be an act of freedom, but an act of amnesia. A culture that refuses to interrogate its traditions, that no longer wishes to know anything of them, condemns itself to endure them in distorted forms: through violent returns, identity-based rigidities, or political instrumentalizations.

This observation, however, does not lead us to sacralize tradition as such. Not all religious forms are equivalent. Some have become inert, others toxic, while still others deserve to be taken up again, reinterpreted, and revitalized. The task is therefore neither to restore a frozen tradition nor to dissolve it into contemporary individualism. Rather, it is to recognize tradition as history, as memory, as living material through which humanity has been formed—for better and for worse.

Our task is not to save everything, nor to reject everything, but to discern. To identify what, within religious traditions, can still nourish a human life that is dignified, open, and reflective. This requires critical labor, but also respect, attentiveness, and a form of creative fidelity. For within traditions there also exist ethical resources, symbolic forms of wisdom, and languages of meaning that it would be regrettable—indeed dangerous—to abandon altogether.

Religious inheritance is not a dead weight. It is a field of tensions, possibilities, conflicts, and promises. It is for us to make of it a living matrix, an active memory, an appeal to discernment rather than to repetition or rejection.

II. Individual and Community: Believing Alone, Believing Together

Every religion—whatever its origin or form—addresses both the individual and the community. It speaks to personal conscience, but also to the human group, the social fabric, the collective body. There is no lived faith without inner singularity, but there is no enduring belief without mediation, without shared language, without ritual, without transmission. Religion is always a space of dual belonging: intimate and public, interior and social.

If we are to think religion today, however, we must first understand the kinds of individuals and communities to which past religions originally spoke. What imaginaries, what social structures, what figures of authority, what conceptions of the world shaped them? These were individuals strongly situated within systems of kinship, political hierarchies, and ordered cosmologies. They were communities marked by clear boundaries—ethnic, religious, territorial. Such configurations gave rise to texts, institutions, rites, and dogmas.

Yet nothing meaningful can be continued or invented today unless we understand who we have become. What kind of individuals are we? Autonomous yet fragmented, connected yet isolated, saturated with information yet often disoriented. And what kinds of communities do we form? Fragile nations, recomposed identities, digital networks, affective or ideological diasporas, multiple and shifting forms of belonging. Accelerated globalization profoundly reshapes our modes of relation: it draws spaces closer together while weakening bonds; it multiplies exchanges while eroding rootedness.

A double question therefore imposes itself:

What kind of individuals do we wish to become—responsible, free, and solidaristic? Or merely consumers, competitors, agents of self-optimization?

What kind of community do we wish to build—open fraternities, democratic societies endowed with spiritual awareness? Or identity-driven groups, digital tribes, masses governed by economic flows?

These questions are fundamental to any authentic religious project. Yet they are largely obscured today—not because they are too complex, but because they are submerged in the confusion between the political and the economic. The individual is reduced to the voter or the customer; the community is assimilated to the state or the market. The horizon of meaning is replaced by that of performance or efficiency.

For this reason, the great religious traditions—as well as the philosophies of social bond—cannot simply be transposed into the present. They must be reappropriated on the basis of a lucid anthropological diagnosis: of who we are today, and of what we wish to become. Religion can play a living role only if it once again encounters the concrete human being, in reflective individuality and in the capacity to live with others—differently.

III. Good and Evil, the Cosmos, and Truth: A Forgotten Demand

One cannot speak seriously of religion—or even simply of a reflection on the religious—without addressing the fundamental questions that have always traversed it:

What is our place in the cosmos?

What do the Good, Evil, the Just, and the True mean?

What is the meaning of our actions, our commitments, our passage through the world?

In earlier times, these questions lay at the very heart of religions. They structured foundational narratives, rituals, prohibitions, laws, and institutions. They shaped worldviews, forms of life, and human ends. Today, however, these questions are in a state of extreme confusion: eclipsed or fragmented, sometimes rendered almost illegible in the public sphere.

The present situation is paradoxical. Never has humanity had such extensive access to information, to knowledge, to the traditions of the entire world—and yet never has it appeared so disoriented with regard to the ends of its own existence. Religion, when it is not caricatured, is marginalized; and the great questions it once carried are dissolved into a technological, media-driven, or economic background noise.

Several features characterize this drift.

Our Relation to the Cosmos Has Been Largely Forgotten

Traditionally, religions situated human beings within a cosmic order: stars, seasons, elements, and life cycles were understood as interconnected with human existence. Today, the cosmos has become external and detached—first an object of exploration, then of exploitation. The sense of belonging to the world, of participation in a living and sacred order, has largely vanished. Nature is viewed as a resource or a backdrop, rarely as a matrix or a bond. This radical dissociation weakens our capacity to think finitude, debt, and gratitude—dimensions that are essential to any religious sensibility.

The Concepts of the Good, Evil, Truth, and Justice Are Nearly Evacuated

In a world governed by economic logics, “money has no smell”—no good, no evil, no meaning. Morality is reduced to a utilitarian code of conduct, embedded in political or managerial procedures, accompanied by sanctions or indicators. Truth itself is no longer an ethical value or an inner demand; it is relativized, replaced by effectiveness—by what works, persuades, or circulates most efficiently. Action is no longer oriented by principles, but by the management of flows, risks, and opinions.

This situation is not problematic only for religion; it is problematic for any form of responsible human thought. A religion worthy of the name cannot evade these questions. It must confront reality, propose orientation, and articulate the relation between human beings, truth, and the world.

To think religion today, therefore, is not merely to speak of traditions, rites, or communities. It is to reintroduce, in a lucid and renewed way, the questions of the Good, Evil, the Just, and the True into a world that has eclipsed them without replacing them. It is also to reconstruct a sense of cosmic belonging—not through a return to the past, but through a renewed awareness of our bond with the world in all its forms, living and non-living alike—a bond upon which our very survival may depend.

Conclusion

The Conditions for a Renewed Thought of Religion

If religion is still to be thought in the twenty-first century—not as a relic of the past nor as a psychological compensation, but as a human, ethical, and symbolic task—then it is necessary to state clearly what such a reflection must not do, and what it may legitimately undertake.

I. What It Must Not Do

A renewed thought of religion cannot betray past humanity, nor can it flee the challenges of the present.

It cannot allow itself to erase the millennia-long heritage of human traditions in the name of modernity or rationality. For this heritage, even when it must be reread, criticized, and rethought, carries fundamental intuitions: the great existential questions; practices of seeking, silence, and gift; emotions and sentiments that give human life its depth—fear, wonder, gratitude, fidelity, compassion. These are inner and cultural resources that no era can afford to ignore without mutilating itself.

At the same time, such a reflection cannot retreat into nostalgic defense or identity-based withdrawal. It cannot evade the transformations of the contemporary world, nor ignore its current impasses. It must have the courage to confront new realities: moral disorientation, fragmentation of bonds, crisis of meaning, and the globalization of interdependence. This requires accepting disturbance, complexity, and plurality—without renouncing the search for meaning.

II. What It Must Assume

To think religion today is to take up several essential challenges.

It requires rethinking our relation to the cosmos—not as a relation of use, exploitation, or indifference, but as one of deep belonging, of co-participation in a living and fragile world imbued with meaning. This involves recovering a cosmic consciousness, not by returning to ancient myths, but through a form of thought reconciled with nature, rhythm, and finitude.

It also requires rethinking ourselves as individuals and as communities: recognizing the dignity and singularity of each conscience, while acknowledging that faith, memory, and meaningful speech are also lived collectively, within shared forms of life and symbolic bonds that unite without enclosing. It calls for the creation of new forms of conviviality conducive to both individual and collective flourishing.

Finally, it demands the restoration of the proper place of the Good, the Just, and the True in our lives—not as dogmatic absolutes, but as orienting values, guides for action, and calls to responsibility. It means reaffirming that truth is not relative to opinion, that the Good cannot be reduced to interest, and that justice is not synonymous with procedure.

Toward a Shared Spiritual Responsibility

We can already observe the emergence of collective forms which, without necessarily claiming allegiance to a dogma or a church, nonetheless participate in a broad renewal of the religious. The Buen Vivir movement in Latin America, inspired by Quechua and Aymara wisdom, rearticulates nature, community, and spirituality within a non-extractive logic. Interreligious networks such as Religions for Peace or GreenFaith work toward a global spiritual mobilization for ecological and social justice. In several African, Asian, and European cities, spaces of interconvictional dialogue bring together believers, agnostics, and seekers of meaning around shared practices: fasting, meditation, and care for the most vulnerable. These experiences—fragmentary yet significant—demonstrate that a collective spiritual responsibility is possible, grounded in respect for diversity and oriented toward the common world.

In this sense, the task of a contemporary reflection on religion is at once modest and immense. It does not seek to prescribe what one ought to believe. Rather, it opens a space in which the great human questions may once again be raised, carried, and transmitted—a space of silence and speech, memory and commitment. Not in order to return to the past, but to inhabit the present with depth, as women and men who are responsible, lucid, connected—and free.

A renewed religious thought is not pure speculation. At certain moments and in certain places, it has been embodied by singular figures, emerging from diverse traditions, who have succeeded in holding together spiritual rootedness and ethical exigency. Gandhi, within Hinduism, redefined nonviolence (ahimsa) as political engagement grounded in truth (satya) and cosmic interdependence. Ibn ʿArabī, in Andalusian Sufism, articulated a vision of the divine as a dynamic and open totality, linking love, knowledge, and the plurality of religious forms. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist, conceived ecological justice as an act of faith rooted in care for the land and for communities. Simone Weil, finally—a mystical, engaged philosopher—wove together attention to the other, obedience to the good, and the effacement of the ego as irreducible spiritual demands. These figures do not belong to a closed system; rather, they show that a living faith can generate justice, lucidity, and relation.

Postface

This text does not claim to conclude, nor to offer the final word on a question as vast as that of religion. It presents itself as a modest yet resolute contribution, arising from a specific position: that of a scholar, a historian, a philosopher, and a citizen of the world—engaged in his time, animated by the demand for rigor and by the need for meaning.

We have spoken here neither in the name of a particular tradition, nor as prophets, nor as theologians. Our aim has been to set the terms of an open dialogue, at a human scale, attentive to what religion carries in terms of memory, promise, complexity, and responsibility.

We have sought to think religion not as a system to be defended, nor as a relic to be abandoned, but as a task: a task of memory, discernment, relation, and justice. What we call “the religious” here is less an institutional form than a call to depth—a possible bond between human beings, the world, and what counts as truth or good.

Our time is marked by multiple fractures—social, symbolic, ecological. It is also traversed by silent demands: for meaning, belonging, and truth. It is to this expectation that the present text seeks to respond—not by projecting a solution, but by opening a space of thought and listening, in which believers and non-believers, scholars, educators, and citizens might together seek anew what is worth transmitting, living, and sharing.

If this text can serve as a point of departure for such an endeavor, it will have achieved its proper measure.

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