The topic I want to pester Professor Keane about is belief. Christian Moderns uses the missionary encounter on the Indonesian…
An absence of belief?
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Colonialism and conflict
If the idea of purification is to retain broad currency across the colonial landscape, it may need to be defined…
No view from nowhere
I’ll start with a comment about my own angle of approach. There is of course no view from nowhere, and…
Reconstructing belief
I would like to continue the discussion of modernity and the problem of belief, which, like Danilyn Rutherford, I do…
Giving up the Holy Ghost
Keane’s account is convincing, but it is important to contextualize the semiotic ideology he defines. I could be misreading Keane…
Higher times in the Bible Belt
Rich in interdisciplinary breadth, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age offers an opportunity to reflect on the reception of…
What Taylor misses
The heft of a book would seem proportional to its exhaustiveness. It is no surprise that Charles Taylor's A Secular…
Casting away our crutches
The various essays on A Secular Age gathered in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun’s Varieties of Secularism in…
Politics of misrecognition
What would secularity look like if we approached it through the perhaps vague rubric of “indigenous ‘religions’”? . . .…
Circling the line
I was asked after the 2008 Presidential election to make some loose predictions about the future of conservative political religions…