...JB: It sounds to me like you are describing a historical development. How would you compare today’s religious movements with the revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, for instance? They...
insta---batmanapollo
The perspective of the common
...Wisconsin), just to mention a few instances of a common situation known to everybody. Both the sovereign decision and the contract operate according to a logic of inclusion and exclusion...
Does tolerance require struggle?
...reform process and to put its weight behind freedoms welcomed by the pious majority, while neglecting the freedoms of non-pious groups. For instance, severe strictures were put on alcohol and...
Placing the pandemic in time: Astrology and Covid-19
...genres, beyond supermarket-aisle horoscopes. As astrology has gained popularity in recent years, aided by digital and social media including YouTube channels, podcasts, online schools, computer software, and countless Instagram memes,...
Genealogy and plurality
...clichés presented in this essay about how there is a plurality of religions can undermine this claimed advantage. In a characterization of some ideal (secularism, for instance), words like “should...
Evangelicals who have left the right
...and on coalition-building and more issue-by-issue policy assessment (more Democrat on environment, for instance, and more Republican on abortion). While the religious right remains robust, in 2005 Christianity Today lambasted...
Islam and terrorism
...dictatorship on the promise of the justice and legitimacy of the normative order being instantiated thereby. The desperate struggle we have witnessed against the U.S. occupation, and the ensuing brutal...
On reductionism
...dismissal that itself ends up being an instance of what it aims to prevent. Reductionism needn’t be dismissed tout court. I don’t hope to do a great deal of image-management...
Do my socks respond to my caress?
...do things simply mediate a power that resides elsewhere, for instance by acting as symbols. Things have a power all to themselves, one that is irreducible to the human. Like...
Paul Kahn’s mis-prognosis of America’s social imaginary
...selective use of history. Consider, first, Kahn’s comparison of modern democratic revolutionaries and early Protestants. To paraphrase: the trans-temporal, collective subject of the revolutionary sovereign, instantiated in every citizen, is...