This introduction specifies the context in which the texts that make up the dossier were written, presents them and outlines their respective main axes. In a second, more distant phase, it opens up three critical questions, linked to what Joas proposes and aiming to continue the discussion on what is at stake at the social, political and religious levels. It welcomes the aim of a 'self-reflection of social and cultural sciences on their biological bases and normative contents' in relation to (...) historically determined social and political problems. It underlines the anthropological substratum explored by the Joassian approach, which aims to highlight what is at stake between the individual and social bodies, the singular creativities of human action, and the social structures and dynamics. It is under this horizon that the three questions that mark a gap with Joas' work emerge. The first one focuses on the games between body and overcoming, and what is mobilised there, where collective organisation that is not reducible to politics alone and to what would be proper to it, takes shape. The second returns to the question of rite, to evoke its importance at the heart of our worldly activities, in a secular and non-religious mode. The third part takes up the strictly religious question, questioning how Joas deals with the modern differentiation of social spheres, as well as the absence, in his work, of a critical analysis of religions in their traditions, with all the pathologies that may run through them. (shrink)

The Powers of the Sacred is an opportunity for Hans Joas to return to the dynamogenic character of religion highlighted by William James and Émile Durkheim, in order to propose a reflection on the process of sacralisation of values. The present contribution enters into a pragmatist dialogue with Joas’s proposals, based on investigations carried out in an evangelical context. The aim is to show how certain spiritual practices encouraged on the horizon of collective celebrations participate in the creation of values (...) configured by religious entrepreneurs anxious to capture the religious energy of the faithful for the benefit of conservative political mobilizations. These empirical cases shed new light on the notion of the sacred proposed by Joas, and allow us to identify certain methodological knots, notably in the relationship between Joasian concepts and the notions through which social actors confer meaning on their individual or collective experiences. (shrink)