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This work considers the intellectual history of religious recognition. The concept is usually thought to begin with Hegel but this work takes a much broader sweep, moving from the New Testament to the modern day connecting the history of religion with philosophical approaches.

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During the last twenty years, the theory of recognition has become an established field of philosophy and social studies. Variants of this theory often promise applications to the burning political issues of current society, such as the challenges of multiculturalism, group identity, and conflicts between ideologies and religions. The seminal works of this trend employ Hegelian ideas to tackle the problem of modernity. Although some recent studies also investigate
the pre-Hegelian roots of recognition, this concept is normally considered to be a product of the secular modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study challenges this assumption and claims that important intellectual roots of the
concept and conceptions of recognition are found in much earlier religious sources.

Risto Saarinen outlines the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to present day. He connects the history of religion with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of the
insights provided by the tradition of religious recognition. He proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the long history of religious recognition.

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Saarinen fills a much-needed lacuna by recovering the contributions of religion (in this case, Christianity) to recognition history...[A]s a religious scholar who also dabbles into the study of recognition ideology, I offer hearty congratulations to a senior colleague for producing an unprecedented volume that adds to scholarship on recognition. Having perused innumerable monographs on contemporary recognitional development in philosophy and political theory, I can say that Saarinen´s reading of recognitional themes in the religious tradition of Christianity could generate new trajectories in contemporary theorizing of recognition. Timothy T.N. Lim, Reading Religion

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Risto Saarinen is Professor of Ecumenics and Chair of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki. Saarinen has published extensively in the fields of medieval and early modern philosophy and theology as well as contemporary ecumenism. He is the author of Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (OUP, 2011).

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