Over the past thirty years much has been written about the critical theory of society that was produced by a small group of left-wing Hegelians in the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and in the United States. This book seeks to make a contribution to the continued development of the critical theory of society and religion as it offers a corrective to the one-sided, positivistic development of the modern social sciences as well as to the increasing social irrelevancy of the contemporary Christian church. Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory of Religion is a content analysis of the critical theory of religion of Max Horkheimer, which was developed throughout almost all of his writings and later interviews from 1926 to 1973, the year of his death.

The Dialectics of the Religious and the Secular: Studies on the Future of Religion contains the work of 15 international scholars who have wrestled with the question of the relevancy, meaning and future of religion within the context of the increasing antagonisms between the religious and secular realms of modern civil society and its globalisation. Each author indicates the possibility of mitigating or preventing the continuation of this antagonism by historically moving toward a more reconciled and humane future global society.

In the midst of the increasing antagonism between religion and secularity, the sacred and the profane, faith and reason - currently described in terms of "the clash of civilizations" - is religion any longer relevant or meaningful in the globalizing development of modern subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, family, society, state and history? If so, how and to what end? In the socio-historical context of the highly secular, neo-liberal/neo-conservative globalization movement, the question of the social meaning and relevancy of religion has entered directly into the contemporary discourse on the future of humanity. This book gives expression to the research of international scholars as they wrestled with these issues during the Future of Religion courses held at the Inter-university Center in Dubrovnik, Croatia from 2001-2005. ?Contributors include: Aleksandra Basa, Reimon Bachika, Ales Crnic, Anja Finger, Helmut Fritzsche, Denis Janz, Hans-Herbert Kogler, Werner Krieglstein, Mislav Kukoc, Gottfried Kuenzlen, Aurelia Margaretic, Michael R. Ott, Dunja Potocnik, A. James Reimer, Kjartan Selnes, Rudolf J. Siebert, Hans K. Weitensteiner, Brian Wilson, Katarzyna Zielinska.
Michael R. Ott, Ph.D. (1998) in Sociology, Western Michigan University is a Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. His publications on the Critical Theory of Religion include Max Horkheimer's Critical Theory of Religion (University Press of America, 2001).