Open Call for Thematic Articles for Conspiratio no.7, December 2025
The philosopher Leo Strauss argued that, in the Western tradition, philosophy and revelation make contrasting claims on the fundamental question of how to live. He insisted that the “life of free insight” proposed by philosophy is incompatible with the “life of obedient love” announced by the Bible.[1]
Today, we confront this question in an unprecedented way. The certainty that the progress of industrial technoscience would consign religion to the dust heap of history has been decisively shaken. The well-regarded sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, who was once a vocal proponent of ‘secularization theory’—the notion that the modern world is coeval with a decline of religion—announced, in 1999, that “the assumption we live in a secularized world is false. The world today…is as furiously religious as it ever was…”[2]
Today, both the learned and the layperson share his view. But the relation, if any, between religion and faith is not as well understood. In his last public talk, Ivan Illich declared, “I don’t want to be a religious man. I am the descendent of martyrs…people who somehow understood that Jesus freed us from what was then, as today, called religion.”[3] Yet, Illich understood himself “as a man of faith,”[4] which, he pointed out, “founds certainty on the word of someone whom I trust and makes this knowledge, which is based on trust, more fundamental than anything I can know by reason.”[5] In ranking faith higher than reason, Illich also ranks philosophy lower than love.[6]
To better grasp the contemporary moment, it is therefore important to clarify whether and how religion, faith, and philosophy signpost three possibly incongruent ways of living.
Is the “secularization theory” mistaken, and if so, in what ways? What does the term “post-secular” mean, and how widespread is the phenomenon it refers to? Does the ‘return of religion’ imply the ‘eclipse of philosophy’? Does the slogan ‘I believe in science,’ borne of the COVID years, intimate a commitment to a philosophical mode of life? How does a philosophical life differ from a religious life? In what ways are the demands of religion different from that of faith? What is the relationship, if any, between fidelity to a friend and the desire to know?
These are some orienting questions relevant to the next issue of Conspiratio (December 2025) whose theme is Religion, Faith, & Philosophy: contrasting ways of living?
Submit your abstract (150 words) by March 1, 2025. Send them to [email protected] Complete manuscripts sent by May 30th, 2025, will be circulated for discussion by participants of the annual Thinking with Ivan Illich gathering scheduled in Lucca, Italy between June 18th and 23rd 2025. To be published in the forthcoming issue of Conspiratio, these discussed articles must be finalized by October 1, 2025.
- Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.74.
- Berger, Peter, The desecularization of the world: a global overview, in (Eds) Peter Berger, et al. The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, 1992 W.E. Eeederman, p.2.
- Illich, Ivan. The personal decision in a world dominated by communication. Conspiratio, no.4, Spring 2023, p.102
- Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future, (eds). David Cayley, Anansi Press, 2005, p.61.
- Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future, (eds). David Cayley, Anansi Press, 2005, p.57.
- Illich, Ivan. “Philosophia…ancilla caritatis” in Philosophy, Artifact, Friendship, unpublished lecture, 1996.
