PENULTIMATE DRAFT: THE DEFINITIVE VERSION WAS PUBLISHED IN Philosophy Today 62.4 (2018), 1277-1282. https://www.pdcnet.org/philtoday/content/philtoday_2018_0062_0004_1277_1282  “Religion” and its Other: A Response to Gregg Lambert, Return Statements David Newheiser Return Statements is a suggestive book, which opens more questions than it answers. The first sentence reads: “Most books are written with a clear statement in mind, usually in the space of a few years, as if to emulate a thought that unfolds as a continuous and unbroken element. This book is not among them.” 1 I find it difficult to summarize Lambert’s main claims, but I take it that the book aims to stimulate reflection rather than resolve the issues it raises. In that spirit, this brief response continues the conversation Lambert has opened by sketching a question concerning the relation between religion and its other. “The return of religion” is a theme signaled in the subtitle of Return Statements, and it recurs throughout. In response to those who welcome the resurgence of religion in a post-secular age, Lambert describes himself as skeptical. In his view, the post-secular enthusiasm for weak theology fails to contend with fundamentalisms that are flourishing, and it is at odds with a critical rationalism. 2 Lambert is particularly critical of John Caputo: where Caputo appeals to Jacques Derrida in order to defend a religiosity devoid of content, Lambert argues that Derrida attends to the dark affinity between hatred and the divine. In Lambert’s view, “What we need most today is a little less religion…and a bit more good old-time psychoanalytic pessimism.” 3 Although Lambert criticizes Caputo, I think the two authors are close insofar as they both frame the conversation in terms of religion. My worry is that this risks obscuring the issues at stake. Because the modern category “religion” is marked by colonialism and the rise of the secular state, 1 Gregg Lambert, Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1. 2 Ibid., 1–5. 3 Ibid., 64. The quotation continues: “Which is to say, a little less exaltation of a position of ‘non-knowledge’ concerning the impossibility of Love, and a bit more knowledge of the hatred that binds us to this God who murders us daily, but who leaves us in the dark concerning the secret source of his passion.”