So far as I know, Jürgen Habermas set the ball rolling. In 2008 he wrote a celebrated essay, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age.’ The thrust of what he had to say first occurred to him after he had attended a memorial service for Max Frisch, the Swiss author and playwright, which was held in St. Peter’s Church in Zurich as long ago as April 9, 1991. The service began with Karin Pilliod, Frisch’s partner, reading out a brief declaration written by the deceased. It stated, among other things: ‘We let our nearest speak, and without an “amen”. I am grateful to the ministers of St. Peter’s in Zurich … for their permission to place the coffin in the church during our memorial service. The ashes will be strewn somewhere.’ Two friends spoke but there was no priest and no blessing. The mourners were made up mostly of people who had little time for church and religion. Frisch himself had drawn up the menu for the meal that followed.

Habermas wrote much later (in 2008) that, at the time, the ceremony did not strike him as unusual but that, as the years passed, he came to the view that the form, place and progression of the service were odd. ‘Clearly, Max Frisch, an agnostic, who rejected any profession of faith, had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rîte de passage which brings life to a close.’ And this more than a hundred years since Nietzsche announced the death of God.

Habermas went on to use this event – Frisch’s memorial – as the basis for his essay, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing.’ In this effort he traces the development of thought from the Axial Age to the Modern period and argues that, while ‘the cleavage between secular knowledge and revealed knowledge cannot be bridged’, the fact that religious traditions are, or were in 2008, an ‘unexhausted force’, must mean that they are based more on reason than secular critics allow and this ‘reason’, he thought, lies in religion’s appeal to what he called ‘solidarity’, the idea of a ‘moral whole’, a world of collectively binding ideals, ‘the idea of the Kingdom of God on earth’. It is this, he said, that contrasts successfully with secular reason, and provides the ‘awkward’ awareness of something that is missing. In effect, he said that the main monotheisms had taken several ideas from classical Greece – Athens as much as Jerusalem – and based their appeal on Greek reason as much as on faith: this is one reason why they have endured.

Habermas has one of the most fertile, yet idiosyncratic and provocative minds of the post-World War Two conversation but his ideas on this score are underlined by, as I see it, an increasing number of contemporaries, all of whom seem to think that there is something missing in our lives.