Hvad er religion? En samtale med Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen – og en del andre

Abstract

In addition to a panegyric praise of Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen for his accomplishments, I discuss what lies at the core of religion. Contrary to a fideistic notion and by means of a conversational triangulation with Durkheim, Wittgenstein, and Frazer, I argue for both the emotional and cognitive dimension. The emotional aspect necessarily implies an epistemological dimension, but the latter overdetermines the former. To understand both present and past forms of religion, we need to give up the notion of ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as the essence of religion and replace them with ‘faithfulness’ and ‘investing faithfulness into’. Paradoxically, such an understanding enables us to see close connections between ancient forms of religion and contemporary ones.