摘要:Postmodern theology‖ has come of age. It now has its own counter- movement, a new generation of philosophers marching under the flag of materialism, realism, and anti-religion who complain that the theologians are back at their old trick of appropriating attempts to kill off religion in order to make religion stronger. A younger generation has become impatient with Derrida and with all the soixante-huitaires, the dead white elders who dominated continental philosophy for nearly half a century, fed up with their so called relativism and postmodern religion. They are tired of hearing about undecidability, religious turns, and the ethics of the other, and they are looking for a more hard-nosed, materialist, realist atheist line of thought. This presents a crisis for continental philosophy whose style of thinking from Kant to the present is being challenged by a new and in my view justified complaint that continental philosophy has been resistant to and defensive about the hard sciences. The crisis is all the more interesting because it has been set off in no small part by the so-called ―religious turn:‖ if religion is where continental philosophy leads us, the argument seems to go, then so much the worse for continental philosophy! The specters of religion have sparked panic selling in the market for continental thinking as we know it. This is an issue that must be addressed. Given the historical violence religion has provoked and the reactionary meanness and stupidity of the Religious Right in American politics today, I am no less anxious about ―religion.‖ That makes it all the more important for me to sort out what I am saying and what I am not, since my own work on Derrida and religion, as Michael Naas points out clearly, is no less informed by protecting what Derrida calls laiceté.2I try to work from a position both within and without religion, although the Christian Right considers me something of a resident alien