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Religion—especially in those concentrated forms referred to as the -sacred” or -holy”—has often been represented as something utterly distinct from the mundane dimensions of society, in particularfrom politics and the economy. In the lawlessness of the sacred, Rudolf Otto found evidence of its status as -wholly other,” sui generis and beyond comparison. On the other hand, it is precisely this exceptional nature that, for Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille, marked the sacred as a mode of sovereignty, of a transcendent power capable of suspending the legal or economic order, whether through antinomian violence or through breaking the cycle of market exchange. We will develop the association between sovereignty and the sacred as states of exception, in which ideas of divine omnipotence model human agency and authority. The displacement of such exceptional moments by a disenchanted modernity was at the heart of Schmitt’s critique of Max Weber’s sociology of religion. We will trace the genealogy of this displacement to earlier Christian theological notions, including Protestant interpretations of the idea that miracles ceased in the Apostolic Age. Such a genealogy reinforces Hans Blumenberg’s and Michael Allen Gillespie’s arguments that modernity rests on human self-assertion against the terrifying image of a sovereign God that was raised in the Middle Ages by Nominalists. Representative Bibliography (for reference only): Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share.Trans. Robert Hurley.3 vols. New York: Zone Books, 1991-93. Benavides, Gustavo. -Holiness, State of Exception, Agency.” In Brigitte Luchesi and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds., Religion in Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans Kippenberg on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, 61-73. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Weber, Max. -Science as a Vocation.” In H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed.,From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge, 1991. Yelle, Robert. -The Trouble with Transcendence: Carl Schmitt’s ‘Exception’ as a Challenge for Religious Studies.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 184-201. Bemerkung Lectures, in English, will be based on the instructor’s book manuscript. Each lecture will allow ample time for student discussion.Written coursework may be submitted in English or German. Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät LMU München WiSe 1415 Univ.Prof.Dr. Yelle Robert A