Sacred Pursuits And Civil Rights

Once being a critical part of modern narrative,separation of religion from the political realm has recently been confronted with severe challenges.On the one hand,along with revival of religion on a global scale,there is an increasingly strong appeal for religion to intervene in the political realm again.On the other hand,the principle of neutrality upheld by liberalism prompts politics to give up its commitment to the issue of ultimate value,thus causing dissatisfaction on the value scale.All this makes rethinking of the issue of transcendental dimension an imperative.This thesis,by referring to theoretical resources behind different ideological traditions,attempts to explore a thinking in the transcendental dimension,which can not only include modern values,but also reconstruct politics.However,between transcendence and modern values lies a sort of tension.The tension is the tension between theological pursuits and secular rights.How to resolve the tension and achieve reconciliation between the two is the focus and main line of this research,and also an important criterion to judge whether reconstruction of the transcendental dimension in the political realm is successful.Based on different theoretical resources behind different ideological traditions,this thesis divides exploration of the transcendental dimension in the political realm into three different approaches.The first approach is based on theology,which introduces religion to the public political realm and reconstructs the transcendental dimension using the traditional theological resources.The second approach is based on"quasi-theology".With decline of the traditional religious theology,ideologists of the school attempt to replace "the sacred" with the real political entity.By making use of religious resources,they succeed in transforming sacredness to the secular political regime,thus realizing political goals.The third approach is based on non-theology,which is actually a "detheologization" approach to reconstructing the transcendental dimension.This approach is committed to re-examining liberalists' narrative of secular politics.By overcoming the commonly-seen criticism of moderm politics,including atomic individualism and value neutrality,it reconstucts a new narrative from the transcendental dimension,which is based on secular politics.This research finds out that all the above three approaches can reconcile the transcendental dimension with modern values,but each has its defects.Besides,the three approaches show some common trends and characteristics.First,their efforts to reconstruct the transcendental dimension are all based on the logic of intersubjectivity.Second,their construction of the transcendental dimension in the political realm is bottom-up.In other words,the public realm first plays a role,and then influences the national politics.Third,their intersubjectivity thinking also implies an understanding of interculturalism,that is,to emphasize subjectivity of different cultures as well as their communication and reconciliation under the prerequisite of guaranteeing basic human rights.This inspires scholars to enrich understanding of modern political subjects from the perspective of spiritual significance,and think about construction of"we" from the perspective of political significance.This is also an implication that scholars can explore reconciliation between religion and modern values under the prerequisite of adhering to modern values.To achieve the above goals,it is necessary to reinterpret religion and modern values.In terms of reinterpreting religion,the reinterpretation perspective should benefit its integration with modern values.In terms of reinterpreting modern values,the rigid secular conclusions should be modified to discover the potential homology between modern values and theological values.