| “Religion” as a signifier has, in the contemporary historical occasion that has come to be known as “postmodern,” undergone a shift in meaning. A survey of cultural criticism in the US shows that whereas religion once designated belief in supernatural beings and the idea of afterlife, it now should be understood more productively to name ethical opposition to established truths. The re-emergence of interest in religious thought in the current global, post-Cold War historical moment constitutes a return of what Martin Heidegger has identified as the ontological horizon for philosophy. Soren Kierkegaard's notion of historical memory as repetition allows for a thought of “religion” which, in the present, might be carried beyond national or sectarian discourses to enable critical practices appropriate to the recent development of institutional studies of global cultural expansion (global studies). The Union Theological Seminary in New York City provides an historical location for the twentieth century rise of existentialist theologies which sought new ways of understanding the human history that led to modern existential anxieties about global war, genocide, mechanized labor, systematic oppression of marginal groups, and socio-economic inequities. The existentialist philosophy that theologians in America used to re-think traditional religious doctrines crossed disciplinary dividing-lines into the areas of, first, literary criticism and later cultural studies more generally. Roughly one decade later, European post-structuralism greatly influenced the arts and sciences through radical questioning of the epistemic bases of virtually all institutional disciplines. The struggles of current critical practices to address the fast-growing discourses of globalization might benefit from an enhanced cultural memory. Religious philosophers initiated opposition to the operations of global power networks by appropriating existentialist precepts to identify modern humanity's dread of possible nonexistence and to specifically identify globalization as a manifestation of the dominance of an American imperialism understood to have superseded the boundaries of the nation called America. |
