Ecstasies of Uplift

Abstract “Religion is the decoration of life,” declares Peter Sloterdijk in his newly translated Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry ( MHS ), arguing that much of our understanding of the spiritual life is distorted and exceptionally narrow. With refreshing and renewed vision, this text points out the ways in which the heavenly skies have been a source of divine inspiration and cipher for theopoetic illuminations. We have failed to grasp how modern secularization, ironically, was a blessing in disguise for religion since it helped to unscrew any religious authorities from the burden of needing to associate with or justify their existence through some national, political, or identity-based associations and cultural traditions. Either as a stroke of good fortune or just a contingent set of circumstances, Sloterdijk argues that religion has benefited from secularization—in becoming “useless,” religious practices have been liberated or “emancipated” from the burden of being politicized, nationalized, or mythologized.