One question I have been thinking about is whether contested political theologies can coexist with collective governance, which would have…
An American political theology?
Karl Marx
Religious charity and the spirit of homo economicus
In this brief essay I connect Gates’s philosophy of giving—along with many other contemporary neoliberal philanthropists—to Protestant traditions and the…
Minority matters
Trenchantly framed as “a minority report,” Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report offers more than just…
Legal age
“Now let us see how Bauer formulates the role of the state,” writes Karl Marx in his famous take on…
Blood: A Critique of Christianity
The starting point for Gil Anidjar’s ambitious and daring new book, Blood: A Critique of Christianity, is that modern concepts…
Egypt’s 18th Brumaire
In an essay published in the New York Times, Sheri Berman sees history repeating itself, tragically and farcically, in Egypt.
The end of postcolonialism
The London-based publisher Zed Books recently released Hamid Dabashi's The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (distributed in the U.S. by Macmillan).
Good news from the grand narrative
To be asked to contribute a commentary on Professor Robert Bellah’s magnum opus is a great honor and a privilege…
The Help, ethnography, and ickiness
This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins…
The sun shone fiercely through the window at Starbucks (Part II)
Soon after reading Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, I turned to Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals. It is…