If you want to understand secularism, Emily Ogden reminds us in Credulity, then you can begin with the art of debunking. Secularism is not only a political project; it is also a way of claiming authority on stage, on the page, and in other popular media. Calling out the frauds and the deceivers, secularism would prove, again and again, that there are no mysteries in the world. Secularism’s bad objects are many and various—priestcraft, hokum, fetish, sleight-of-hand—but it would do the same thing to them all. Secularism would authorize itself, indeed it would summon itself into being, by disenchanting all this bunk. Ogden’s marvelous book shows what secularism loves and not just what it hates, what it desires and not just what it wishes to get rid of; Credulity is, among other things, a study of “debunking’s pleasures.” Could it be that the object of debunking matters less to the secularist than the act itself? Could it be that what secularism really wants is not to banish false prophets but to trot them out, endlessly, so that it can demonstrate its mastery over them?
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Credulity, or Science as an intoxication
by
Donovan Schaefer
[Emily] Ogden intends to “accentuate the negative,” so the train of questions I have—questions that view science in a more optimistic light—runs perpendicular to the thrust of her project. Nonetheless, I want to use her picture of the nonmodern obsessions of the scientists to explore how science is understood by the early architects of the secularization thesis. In her account of the debunking maneuvers of Franklin and Lavoisier’s 1784 commission, Ogden proposes that the debunkers are addicted to their debunking. She layers Bruno Latour’s factish—the peculiar feature of moderns to fixate on that which is made versus that which is “factical”—and Sigmund Freud’s fetish—the pathological obsession with a thing that resolves one’s own anxiety about lack. For Latour, the factish—the modern obsession with “facts” as if they were unmade, purely exterior realities—is a delusion. But is it pathological, in the way that it is for Freud? Could we talk about the modern desire for debunking as something other than a dalliance with contempt?
A matter of justice, not merely chastity
CFP | AAR Seminar “Contextualizing the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis”
by
The Editors
"Contextualizing the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis" is a five-year seminar of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) working towards greater understanding about clergy sexual abuse and the range of questions that it raises. The inaugural call for papers for the 2019 AAR Annual Meeting (November 23 - 26, San Diego, CA) is pasted below. Proposals should be submitted via the online PAPERS portal by the AAR deadline of Monday, March 4.