For over fifty years, Rudolf J. Siebert (b.1927) has developed his Critical Theory of Religion and Society out of the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the "Frankfurt School." Born from the World War II ruins of his hometown in Frankfurt, Germany, Siebert's Hegelian thought has developed in conversation with Christian theology, German Idealism, comparative religion, political-economy, sociology, psychology, and history. Also known as Dialectical Religiology, Siebert's literary corpus is saturated with the dialectics of (...) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), especially Hegel's philosophy of right, history, religion, as well as Hegel's theodicy, which lays at the core of the enlightener's work. This volume has collected Siebert's most important works on Hegel and the Hegelian influence on his Critical Theory of Religion and Society, some of which have never been published before. The articles contained in this volume represent over five decades worth of Siebert's engagements with Hegel, and his application of his dialectical critique to a variety of subjects, including secularization, theology, rebellion and revolution, civil society and the family, war and peace, the future of the West, and many other important subjects. As philosophers frequently return to Hegel, especially within the troubling conditions of modernity, this collection of Siebert's articles will serve as a foundational source for the study of Hegelian thought and its relevance to the contemporary moment well into the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

In our essay we trace the evolution of the critical theory of religion, or comparative dialectical religiology, out of the critical theory of society of the Institute for Social Research or the Frankfurt School. For us, the history of religions reflects the history of humanity’s intellectual and spiritual evolution. As we developed our critical theory of religion, we have tried to supersede concretely the great accomplishments of three generations of critical theorists, particularly in the field of religion. One main theme (...) of our critical theory of religion is the dialectic of two modes of existence: having and being; egoism and altruism. As we determinately negated the critical theory of society into our comparative dialectical religiology, we also penetrated deeper into its roots in the works of Kant and Hegel, Marx and Freud, Judaism and Christianity, particularly into the mystical theology of the great dialectician Meister Eckhart and of his many modern followers. We conclude our essay with the vision of the City of Being. (shrink)

For Kierkegaard the leap to faith is an acceptance of the Unknown which is neither given by reason nor deducible from a previous content of consciousness.

Much of what we believe we know, we know through the testimony of others. While there has been long-standing evidence that people are sensitive to the characteristics of the sources of testimony, for example in the context of persuasion, researchers have only recently begun to explore the wider implications of source reliability considerations for the nature of our beliefs. Likewise, much remains to be established concerning what factors influence source reliability. In this paper, we examine, both theoretically and empirically, the (...) implications of using message content as a cue to source reliability. We present a set of experiments examining the relationship between source information and message content in people's responses to simple communications. The results show that people spontaneously revise their beliefs in the reliability of the source on the basis of the expectedness of a source's claim and, conversely, adjust message impact by perceived reliability; hence source reliability and message content have a bi-directional relationship. The implications are discussed for a variety of psychological, philosophical and political issues such as belief polarization and dual-route models of persuasion. (shrink)

This essay is meant to shed light on a discourse that spans centuries and includes different voices. To be aware of such trans-textual resonances can add a level of historical understanding to the reading of philosophical texts. Specifically, we intend to demonstrate how the notion of the ineffable Dao 道, prominently expressed in the Daodejing 道德經, informs a long discourse on incongruent names in distinction to a mainstream paradigm that demands congruity between names and what they designate. Thereby, we trace (...) the development of the idea of the ineffable Dao quite differently from modern mystical interpretations. We show how, in an early Chinese context, it first gives rise to a sociopolitical critique of the incongruity underlying socially constructed names in the Zhuangzi 莊子, then to a discourse on the incongruity between moral virtues and names in Xuanxue 玄學 philosophy, and eventually to Sengzhao’s 僧肇 claim that a perceived congruence of names with things does not entail actual congruence between names and reality. (shrink)