Which Criticism and Whose Humanism?

Richard Miller throughout his works has made an argument for the importance of social and cultural criticism in the work of ethics and drawn especially on arguments in liberal political theory to do so. Lately, he has joined many other scholars, including the author of this chapter, in calling for a form of humanism, what he calls “Critical Humanism.” In this chapter, I set Miller’s arguments in the context of the larger debate about a renewed humanism and isolate key contemporary advocates. In the end, I contend that humanism commits one to a form of hermeneutical, or interpretive, framework in which the complexity of human existence can be understood, and dehumanizing ways of life criticized through cultural forms. Further, I contend that the religions with their symbolic, ritual, and narrative forms provide an indispensable rhetorical resource for that hermeneutical stance, with the resulting position being, on my account, Theological Humanism drawn from Christian sources. Theological and Critical humanism form, I show, a hermeneutical circle important for the study of religion.