On June 24th, 2010, Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as leader of the Australian Labour Party and as Prime Minister of…
Notes from the field

In the summer of 2010, a small group of graduate students who received the SSRC Dissertation Development Research Fellowship (DPDF) blogged regularly for The Immanent Frame. The fellows came together in conjunction with a 2010 DPDF subfield called “After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity.”
After the fellowship period ended, a select group of fellows continued the blog through the fall of 2010. In their short contributions to “Notes from the field,” the fellows shared notes and reflections on their emerging research, as well as other insights and questions, ruminations, and observations.
Then, in early June 2011, the SSRC program on religion and the public sphere convened twelve advanced graduate students and five distinguished professors for a five-day dissertation workshop on religion and international affairs. Over the course of the workshop, students shared their ongoing work, considered critiques from student and faculty participants, and debated the coherence of the very banner under which they had been gathered.
All of these reflections and notes from these students are gathered below.
Shedding daylight on the here and after
In reflecting on the Notes from the Field contributions surrounding the topic of secularization, Jonathan Sheehan, in his recent post…
The importance of place
In Joseph Blankholm’s recent post, he wonders how to begin to understand (or even locate) the atheism of people who…
The telos of the matter
Sharing Jonathan Sheehan’s aversion to discourse that perpetuates the “ideological conflict” between secular and religious teleology, Vincent Pecora, in “A…
Religion is a syncretism (and that’s okay)
There is something very liberating about Jonathan Sheehan’s call for moving orthogonally into the mundanities of everyday research, even though…
“Partizanstvo” and Communist thought in WWII Yugoslavia
The years of World War II---when thousands of Yugoslav workers, peasants, intellectuals and students joined the Communist-led Partisans---provided the foundation…
On good, evil, and the role of religion
In response to statements made by Mark Juergensmeyer in his recent interview with Nathan Schneider, Vincent Pecora states that Juergensmeyer’s…
The old Left, new Left, and new post-secular Left
One notable aspect of the post-secular world is the renewed interest in religion and theology amongst the once ultra-secular radical…
Defining “theodicy” (Part I)
When Leibniz coined the phrase “theodicy” for the title of his landmark 1710 work, Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté…
Obama bears witness (to the past of a tricky phrase)
To “bear witness:” Obama’s phrase was widely quoted but not seriously analyzed. Some attacked (and some still attack) the President…