The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee…
Institutions, discourses, practices… and life-in-the-world
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.
Working on individualism
Even the most open-minded social scientists—those who are up for studying almost any social group or activity—tend to find the…
Commentaries on our age
Each contributor [to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age] delivers a reading of Taylor’s work, helping to evaluate its…
Power spots
“Shoveling fog” is Courtney Bender’s acute phrase for the work of “studying spirituality,” an amorphous term that has suffered much…
Holding on to multiplicity
Scholars of religion (like, it seems, scholars of nearly everything animate and inanimate) have yet to decide if the world…
Atheism and antihumanism as intellectual-historical objects
I begin this post by posing straightaway the questions that will guide my argument. In what way can atheism and…
Catholicism, conservatism, and antihumanist politics
Geroulanos’s central thesis is compelling but simple: French antihumanism, in its theoretical mode, was based on a radicalized “negative anthropology,”…
On the call from outside
In Akeel Bilgrami’s contribution to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, "enchantment" refers to the historical belief that God…
The sounds of science
As previous posts about The New Metaphysicals have illustrated, Courtney Bender’s spiritual but not religious subjects pose a number of…
Understanding disenchantment
Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay "What is Enchantment?" (published in the volume Varieties of Secularism in…