Understanding Religion and Its Influence on the State

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College, we came across this selection of books:

Here we see Arendt's interest in trying to understand religion and its political influence exemplified. Among the titles readily identifiable from the image above are Creative Fidelity, in which Marcel seeks to explain how we experience things like mystery, being, and second reflection in more or less concrete terms; Lev Shestov's Athens and Jerusalem, which navigates the dichotomy between faith and reason as evidenced in the account of Adam and Eve; The Transcendent Unity of Religions, where author Frithjof Schuon demonstrates the fundamental commonality of all faiths from a metaphysical point of view; and volumes II and III of Martin Weber's Religions-Soziologie, a four-volume collection in which the philosopher seeks to understand religion in terms of economic sociology and his rationalization thesis.

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

For more Library photos, please click here.