Civilní náboženství

When explaining our political views, we always arrive at a word or an idea beyond which there is nothing but silence. These “final things” constitute our public space and Jan Jüptner’s book considers them to be civil religion: Czech, European or Western. The scholar maps out civil religion reflections from antiquity up to 20th-century systems theory (Varro, Vico, Rousseau, Bellah, Luhmann). He believes that civil religion comes to life when a society projects its fundamental questions into its vast reality searching for answers concerning its beginning, its potential end and its purpose. The book analyzes the discourse on the crisis in the USA after September 11, while its Czech chapter looks back on the “Czech question” and presents original essays on Jakub Schwarz Trojan’s sermons on the “truth and love” in the media.