In the United States, the Middle East is almost always presented as a problem to be solved—most significantly, the problem…
Democracy and the secular predicament
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.
Engaging the R word
As it promises on the dust jacket, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom delivers a critique of the politics of promoting…
Religious freedom, past and future
For those of us who have been following the Politics of Religious Freedom project on this website and elsewhere, Beyond…
The pathologies of religious freedom
In the preface to his 1947 essay, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty…
A salutary tremor
What logics, strategies, and effects characterize the category of religion as an instrument for governing social life? What possibilities and…
Competing inequalities
Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is a luminous, fiercely argued book. It requires deep and…
A more anxious freedom
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion is notable for its subtlety and intellectual generosity, as…
The uncertainty principles of Heisenberg and Hurd
In the late 1920s, the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a series of scientific papers proposing that the universe could…
The new global politics of religion: A view from the other side
In the summer of 2013, the international Islamic magazine al-Bayan published its Ramadan issue with a striking cover. Flanked by…
Paradoxes of international religious freedom
It has been almost twenty years since the US Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), which was signed…