It is hard to remember, but religious pluralism meant something quite different fifty years ago. We have, I would argue,…
The power of pluralist thinking
public sphere
Religious freedom between truth and tactic
In the last issue of First Things, a self-described coalition of “Catholics and Evangelicals together” defends religious freedom. The coalition…
The naked public sphere?
In light of Rick Santorum's recent comments on religion and the public sphere, we asked a small handful of scholars…
What are the uses of religion?
Raising issues central to post-secularism, Ryan Gillespie reviews three distinct recent works---Steven D. Smith's The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Terry…
Religion and political liberalism
Jason Brennan (Assistant Professor of Business and Philosophy at Georgetown), and Kevin Vallier (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green)…
The big bang
Peter Manseau reviews Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution.
Normative demands of Islamic studies scholarship
As a lawyer, I appreciate the critical importance of historical inquiry to contemporary legal challenges; as a historian, I resist…
Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization
I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a…
Matters of Ultimate Concern
As the 2012 election season draws ever closer, Scott McLemee considers the essays collected in The Power of Religion in…
Adrift on common dreams
What a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during…