Courtney Bender is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-chair of the SSRC’s Working Group on Spirituality,…
Spirituality, entangled: An interview with Courtney Bender
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.
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his…
Ubuntu, reconciliation, and the buffered self
Like many contributors to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, I share the sense that Taylor’s account of Latin…
The Catholic heresy, again
The reason I am talking about Catholics here is because of the subtitle of Bender's book: Spirituality and the American…
Antihumanism and religion
One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of…
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it's an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in…
Hatred and humanism
“Some of our comrades conceive this humanism as though it were a young, fair-haired girl walking through a scented meadow,…
Grasping for authenticity
The New Metaphysicals offers a peek into a world that I found at once pedestrian and strange, and the information…
Man dies again!
"Man dies again.” Or so might one entitle a tabloid version of Stefanos Geroulanos’s excellent work on the history of…
The poverty of atheism
Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call…