Secular modernity is marked by a persistent project of separating the modern body from its waste, masking excremental operations, and thus producing a fantasy of a fully bounded body and subject. The…
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The Editors
Call for Applications | IRCPL Postdoctoral Research Scholar
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The Editors
The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University invites applications for postdoctoral research scholars for a period of three academic years beginning on September 1, 2018. The Institute plans to make two appointments (pending funding), with one position focused on Africa and the other on South Asia. The yearly renewal of the position(s) is contingent upon funding and performance. The postdoctoral research scholar(s) will actively participate in the intellectual development and program activities related to the project "Rethinking Public Religion in Africa and South Asia." The project envisions a partnership between IRCPL, the Institute for African Studies, and the South Asia Institute for research, programming, and coursework on the changing dynamics of interactions among religious communities in the modern world, considering the ways in which religion becomes public through diverse forms of encounter, with a focus on inter-regional differences and flows across South Asia and Africa.
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The Editors
Remembering Saba Mahmood
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The Editors
On March 10, 2018, University of California-Berkeley anthropologist Saba Mahmood died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. Mahmood, a former member of the editorial board of The Immanent Frame and longtime contributor, was a prominent scholar in the study of secularism, feminist theory, ethics, and the politics of religious freedom. Her first book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject won the Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association. ... Saba Mahmood changed the course of scholarship on religion and secularism. The editors of TIF, the editorial board, and TIF’s many contributors are grateful for her ground-breaking work, and saddened by this tremendous loss to us all as an intellectual community.
Book introductions 
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Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela Klassen and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Ekklesia: An introduction
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Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela Klassen and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State takes the tenacious rubric of “church and state” and examines it through a series of revealing things: treaties, royal proclamations, bibles, staffs, amulets, corpses, juries, and trophy heads. Working from three sites within the Americas—Brazil, Canada, and the United States—we argue for the importance of thinking of church and state, or what we call churchstateness, not simply as interrelated institutions or theoretical categories inherited from abroad. Instead, we also think of them as overlapping polities and powerfully twinned concepts kept alive in distinctive ways in the purportedly secular democratic nation-states across the so-called New World. ... Framing our essays with a jointly-written introduction that engages with Eric Santner, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler, among others, we focus on questions of “the people” as variously convened in democratic societies.