The oath used to mean something. It used to ensure the rectitude of our politics and the integrity of our…
Immanuel Kant
What’s more? or, An answer to the question “Is this all there is?”
“Is this all there is?” then, is not a question, or is more than one, and that is part of…
More immanence, more Gods
The apparent battlefield is an old one, and the separation of philosophy from theology has a long history. Philosophy, in…
Criticism and catastrophe
Rather than a cosmopolitan space where all national literary traditions can finally cohabitate on an equal footing, world literature is…
History without hermeneutics: Brad Gregory’s unintended modernity
I would like to draw attention to three aspects of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, a book whose courage and…
On the freedom of the concepts of religion and belief
This short piece attempts to come at the current debate on law and religious freedom from two unusual angles. I…
Christian genealogies of religious freedom
As a historian of religion, much of my recent work has focused on tracing the genealogy of what we call…
Normative or empirical comparisons?
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr confesses that she is not an expert with regard to “the value of normative theory for legal and…
Paul Kahn’s roots
Paul W. Kahn's Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a compelling book, though compelling in…
Landmarks in the critical study of secularism
In September of 2010, Talal Asad, William E. Connolly, Charles Hirschkind, and I met at the annual American Political Science…