One of the dominant notes of contemporary thought is the return of the religious, echo of a political reality characterized by the ups and downs of a new war of religion. It seems that the "secular age" would have given way to a different period in which political action turns out to be a direct derivative of the metaphysical conflict. Facing this situation requires elucidating the ties that unite politics and religion in their dangerous interdependence in the form of violence. This is what these "historical-philosophical inquiries" claim, variations of the daring thesis that sees in modernity a series of metamorphoses of sacralization instead of a process of secularization. With erudition, talent and some provocation, Simon Critchley undertakes a multiple reading: from the paradoxes of civil religion in Rousseau, to the political challenges posed by the return of Pauline messianism in Heidegger, Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, or the implications from political and original sin in Carl Schmitt and John Gray, to the tradition of mystic anarchism and his own debate with Slavoj Žižek about the resistance and the limits of nonviolence, and finally, with Kierkegaard, with some reflections about the infinite demand of a politics of love.