Georgetown Professor Pens his Critical Reflections on New Directions in Contemporary Religion

Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), Patrick Laude, has made a critical contribution to the understanding of religion in the modern world with his book titled Apocalypse des religions. Pathologies et dévoilements de la conscience contemporaine (Apocalypse of Religions: Pathologies and Unveilings of Contemporary Religious Consciousness).

“Religious consciousness is one of the most significant factors, if not the most significant one, in the major turbulences through which the world is going today,” said Professor Laude. “One of the critical theses of the book is that religion has become unduly ‘ideologized’ and ‘psychologized’ out of a loss of attention to both the dimension of transcendence and the sense of the sacred or divine presence.”

Based on several years of research and reflection in religious metaphysics, comparative religion, the contemporary sociology of religion and the study of new religious movements, this book is published by the renowned French publishing house L’Harmattan, which has included the title in its collection Theoria, besides works by major French philosophers and theologians like Jean Borella and Françoise Bonardel.

The book deals, in part, with the spiritual and intellectual crisis of the Muslim world, as well as the positive contributions of traditional Islamic thought and spirituality. “But it is not specifically a book on the crisis of Islam,” explained the author, who critiques religious currents in the modern and post-modern contemporary context in this volume. “While religions have always had a socio-political dimension and psychological aspects, it can be argued that most of what stands for religion today is simply religion as ideology and religion, or spirituality, as psychology.”

The positive side of the analyses developed in the book, he argues, is that these negative trends are helping, by contrast, to unveil more essential and interior aspects of religious phenomena. “There is a critical process of renewal going on amidst the turmoil and the ruins, although it is very much ‘a still silent voice’.”

Professor Laude joined the faculty of GU-Q in 2006, where he teaches courses in religious studies. Professor Laude’s scholarly interests and output lie in comparative mysticism and metaphysics, poetry and mysticism, and Western representations and interpretations of Islamic and Asian spiritual and wisdom traditions. A prolific writer, he is also the editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal of inter-religious studies Religions-Adyān, published by the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue, as well as a regular chronicler for the French review Ultreia!