''Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry'' (german: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen. Über Theopoesie, lit=Making the Heavens Speak. On Theopoetics) is a 2020 book by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.

Summary

The book analyzes religions from a perspective where they are viewed as literary products. Rejecting anti-religious positions such as that of Karl Marx, it examines the genre's stylistic devices, or "theopoetics". Among the subjects it covers are the theatre of ancient Greece, the anti-mythological stance of Plato, ancient Egyptian polytheism, the theologian

Karl Barth Karl Barth (; ; – ) was a Swiss Calvinist theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary '' The Epistle to the Romans'', his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship (except for a single phrase) of the Barmen Declara ...

, Heinrich Joseph Dominicus Denzinger's ''Enchiridion Symbolorum'', the universal claims of Islam, and the

Book of Job The Book of Job (; hbo, אִיּוֹב, ʾIyyōḇ), or simply Job, is a book found in the Ketuvim ("Writings") section of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and is the first of the Poetic Books in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Scholars ar ...

Publication

Suhrkamp Verlag Suhrkamp Verlag is a German publishing house, established in 1950 and generally acknowledged as one of the leading European publishers of fine literature. Its roots go back to the "arianized" part of the S. Fischer Verlag. In January 2010 the ...

published the book in Germany on 26 October 2020. An English translation by Robert Hughes was published by

Polity A polity is an identifiable Politics, political entity – a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of Institutionalisation, institutionalized social relation, social relations, and have a capacity to mobilize ...

in December 2022.

Reception

Stephan Sattler of '' Focus'' placed the book in a group of recent German books about the origins and history of "human understanding of the self and the world", written by Hans Joas, Jan Assmann and

Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...

, which all draw from the latest decades of philological, historical and sociological research. Sattler wrote that each of Sloterdijk's chapters can be read as a standalone essay, and that "this disturbing book should not be missed".

References

Citations

Sources

* * * * {{Peter Sloterdijk 2020 non-fiction books German non-fiction books Books about religion Books of literary criticism Books by Peter Sloterdijk Suhrkamp Verlag books Polity (publisher) books