But then here, on another level, a question similar to that of the Christians above arises: when is human action…
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.
Normative demands of Islamic studies scholarship
As a lawyer, I appreciate the critical importance of historical inquiry to contemporary legal challenges; as a historian, I resist…
The Help, ethnography, and ickiness
This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins…
Affect vs. global totality
The tricky thing about global imaginaries unlike other social imaginaries is the issue of totality. Whereas other kinds of social…
Understanding resacralization (part 2)
The Rimini Meeting is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Everything from the physical construction and take-down of the arena,…
Understanding resacralization (part 3)
Should religious discourse be welcomed in the public sphere, or should we require that it first be translated into secular…
From Oneida to the world (part I)
Tucked in a quiet corner of upstate New York, around a bend in a lonely road, there stands a dramatically…
Thoughts on Near Eastern legal culture
My colleagues at The Talmud Blog asked me to provide a guest post about my research interests.