On July 13, French parliament will vote on a bill to ban burqa-style veils in the name of gender equality…
Not just a bill to support women’s rights or secular values
France
Impure thoughts
What fascinates me about [the] language of purity and contamination is the extent to which it is mobilized in the service…
The poverty of atheism
Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call…
Sex, scandal, and the secular
When it comes to the Catholic Church these days, news headlines offer few opportunities for levity. I’m referring, of course,…
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his…
The scope and uses of secularity
Early in Charles Taylor’s study, he remarks that the secular condition, in which belief is an option and religion a…