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In a new book edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, entitled "The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere" (Columbia University Press), you will find essays by Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler and Cornel West.
Here are some excerpts from Jürgen Habermas's contribution ""The Political": The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology" (pp. 15-33):
"In the welfare state democracies of the latter half of the twentieth century, politics was still able to wield a steering influence on the diverging subsystems; it could still counterbalance tendencies toward social disintegration. (....)...