This book treats the critical theory of religion of Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, J rgen Habermas and other critical theorists who tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience by exploring the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Georg W.F. Hegel, Artur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.

Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

At present, in European and American civil society a new paradigm of doing not only psychology, sociology and philosophy, but also comparative religiology and theology is emerging: it is called communicative rationality and action. A new communicative theology and religiology are also arising. Their central theme is the theodicy problem. The present study approaches this theme in the framework of a critical political theology and comparative religiology in a narrative and discursive fashion. In search for a solution to the theodicy problem, we explore with the help of the critical theory from Max Horkheimer through Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno to Jurgen Habermas, and with the assistance of the new political theology from Johann B. Metz through Helmut Peukert to Edmund Arens, the psychological, sociological, philosophical and theological constellation of universal freedom, reconciliation, and non-possessive love and solidarity out of personal autonomy and sovereignty.