During the last twenty years, the theory of recognition has become an established field of philosophy and social studies. Variants of this theory often promise applications to the burning political issues of current society, such as the challenges of multiculturalism, group identity, and conflicts between ideologies and religions. The seminal works of this trend employ Hegelian ideas to tackle the problem of modernity. Although some recent studies also investigate the pre-Hegelian roots of recognition, this concept is normally considered to be a product of the secular modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study challenges this assumption and claims that important intellectual roots of the concept and conceptions of recognition are found in much earlier religious sources. Risto Saarinen outlines the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to present day. He connects the history of religion with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of the insights provided by the tradition of religious recognition. He proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the long history of religious recognition.

About the Author
Risto Saarinen is Professor of Ecumenics and Chair of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki. Saarinen has published extensively in the fields of medieval and early modern philosophy and theology as well as contemporary ecumenism. He is the author of Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (OUP, 2011).

Reviews
an exercise in analysis, discrimination and interpretation is called for and this is what Professor Risto Saarinen has provided in a very useful study, which has particular relevance to ecumenical theology and dialogue. He draws on recent work in the social sciences, the etymology of words for recognition in several languages, the history of the idea in philosophy and theology and on ecclesiological texts to provide a survey and analysis of both language use and theological thinking in this area. To take the language of recognition more seriously, with the help of this book, will guide our theology into a more personalist and relational mode. * Paul Avis, Ecclesiology *
Saarinen fills a much-needed lacuna by recovering the contributions of religion (in this case, Christianity) to recognition history...[A]s a religious scholar who also dabbles into the study of recognition ideology, I offer hearty congratulations to a senior colleague for producing an unprecedented volume that adds to scholarship on recognition. Having perused innumerable monographs on contemporary recognitional development in philosophy and political theory, I can say that Saarinen's reading of recognitional themes in the religious tradition of Christianity could generate new trajectories in contemporary theorizing of recognition. * Timothy T.N. Lim, Reading Religion *
Saarinen's new book is written for academic specialists in historical and systematic Christian theology; it may prompt interest in recognition among scholars of other religions, and of religious pluralism, as well ... the book's central claim -- that a theological mode of recognition exists independently of Hegel and that post-Hegelian philosophy is indebted to that tradition -- is a bold, very well-defended, and, I think, eminently defensible one ... Saarinen is very good at showing patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the treatment of religious recognition. His carefully structured prose, which is notably unadorned with stylistic flourishes, clearly shows significant variations among accounts of religious recognition. * Suzanne E. Smith, Harvard Theological Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198791966
Author Risto Saarinen
Format Hardback
Page Count 282
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 450g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 137mm * 20mm