Tradition dictated that one of Immanuel Kant’s responsibilities as professor of metaphysics at the University of Königsberg was to lead…
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.
God at the Filipino polls
In a country as religious as the Philippines, it would be easy to assume that clerics have a significant hand in…
Belonging without believing
As against Grace Davie’s vision of European secularization as a form of “believing without belonging,” here we see the genesis…
The rise of “Islamic” broadcasting in Turkey
Before the liberalization of broadcasting in Turkey, the state-owned broadcaster TRT considered Islam a “religion” that could be represented only…
Black crescent, white cross
By now, everyone has seen the Newsweek poll indicating that a majority of Republicans believes President Barack Obama sympathizes with…
What Esther did for her people
Early 2011 will mark the first US television broadcast of the critically acclaimed documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. …
God in America? Really?
I write having seen the first installment of God in America, a three-part series produced by PBS that showed some promise.…
Minnesota secularism gone global
Minnesota politics is a bit, well, different. But uproar over the place of religion in an election mailing may show…
The wisdom of crowds
The majority of Americans may not know much about their own religions, but they seem to have a pretty good…
Don’t drink everything that runs downstream
Concerning recent (and seemingly conflicting) poll results from the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, Justin Reynolds is, I think,…