On November 18-19, dozens of scholars, religious leaders, business people, and intellectuals will gather in New York for the public launch…
Contending Modernities
modernity
Is there a secular body?
Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities,…
Understanding disenchantment
Jane Bennett’s sympathetic yet critical commentary on my essay "What is Enchantment?" (published in the volume Varieties of Secularism in…
Commentaries on our age
Each contributor [to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age] delivers a reading of Taylor’s work, helping to evaluate its…
Waiting for Godot, who is either late or not coming at all
I wondered how long it would take DPDF participants to undo what I thought I had carefully assembled in my opening post on…
After secularization?
In their posts, Vincent Pecora and Jonathan Sheehan suggest imagining secularization as an open-ended, ongoing project. Neither doubts that something…
Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters
Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the…
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it's an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in…
No view from nowhere
I’ll start with a comment about my own angle of approach. There is of course no view from nowhere, and…
Judith Butler and Cornel West in conversation
In a recent symposium held by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the…