Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants,” published in The Atlantic in February 2015, sparked a massive debate. The controversy concerns…
history
Modernity as a hermeneutic problem
I should thank the organizers at The Immanent Frame for hosting a forum on Minding the Modern and all respondents…
Minding hermeneutics and history
Minding the Modern is unusual in several respects. It is organized historically but anti-historicist, methodologically self-aware yet critical of “method,”…
Modern spirits
The Modern Spirit of Asia is like a brilliant pencil sketch for an uncompleted oil painting. Something inspiring appears in…
Contents and discontents of (post)modernity
The Unintended Reformation is an unusual work of history in deliberately focusing as much on the present as on the…
Theorizing religion in modern Europe
On March 7-8, 2014, Harvard University will be hosting an international conference entitled "Theorizing Religion in Modern Europe."
Historical arguments and omissions
A number of the forum reviewers raise objections to various aspects of the historical arguments in The Unintended Reformation. Others…
Genre, method, and assumptions
More than 60 reviews of The Unintended Reformation have appeared since January 2012, including forums in four journals (Historically Speaking, Church…
A Kingdom that no longer says Whatever
As a scholar working and living in the Netherlands, I apparently live in a state of affairs in which disinterested…
Chinese religions in comparative historical perspective
This short essay draws up the principal ideas from a book chapter concerning the historical field of Chinese religions in…