...so needlessly politically self-wounding it would be. Secularity remains then, in W.B. Gallie’s phrase, an “essentially contested concept” that cannot easily become an analytical concept for investigating current political debates...
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Notes from the field
Sacred, secular, and soccer
by David Buckley...are apparently prohibited from showing “manifestation of religious faith” in moments of celebration. Thinking through the DPDF After Secularization research group’s San Diego meeting, I just couldn’t pass up this...
Is critique secular?
Is critique secular?
by Chris Nealon...about belief – about how she loved her family’s fantastical stories exactly because she didn’t believe in them). This angle of vision seems broadly true of the current secular academic...
books
Going Catholic in New York
by Nicole Greenfield...church. But it was only when I started to feel a little bit lost in the biggest of cities—New York, where I had begun a job in the publishing industry—that...
here & there
Ross Douthat responds to James K.A. Smith on the Pew Religious Knowledge Survey
by Charles Gelman...Great Awakening, or a pious Jew who doesn’t know that Maimonides was Jewish? Most certainly — and many of the Pew Forum’s questions fall into exactly this category, testing a...
here & there
Christianity and witchcraft
by Laura Duane...Philip Jenkins’ fine book, The Next Christendom, it has become popular in some Christian circles to romanticize African Christianity as more orthodox, spiritually vital, and morally pure than western Christianity....
Religions and their publics
Stuck in the middle with you
by Gregory Starrett...so on, ideas against which we so often set the apparently contrasting term “religion” for the purpose of organizing inquiry both conceptually and practically (“Religion and Pluralism,” for example, or...
Is this all there is
All or nothing: An unfree style
by Joseph Winters
...this matter. The self’s desire to be all, to be in communion with the entire world, constantly runs up against limits and reminders of loss, contingency, and mortality. Finally, the...
here & there
The history of Tony Judt
by Charles Gelman...he balks. “Richard is being a bit mischievous,” Judt replies without smiling. He concedes that he has “always been verbally provocative” but that he doesn’t seek out controversy. A day...