Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion is notable for its subtlety and intellectual generosity, as…
religious freedom
A salutary tremor
What logics, strategies, and effects characterize the category of religion as an instrument for governing social life? What possibilities and…
The pathologies of religious freedom
In the preface to his 1947 essay, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty…
Religious freedom, past and future
For those of us who have been following the Politics of Religious Freedom project on this website and elsewhere, Beyond…
Engaging the R word
As it promises on the dust jacket, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom delivers a critique of the politics of promoting…
Beyond Religious Freedom—An introduction
Last summer I read All Can Be Saved by the eminent historian of colonial Latin America, Stuart Schwartz. It’s a…
Thinking with Saba Mahmood
Mahmood outlines a set of concepts that are historically central to the workings of secularism and elucidates how they facilitate…
Secularism at home and abroad
The stark divide between the sacred and the profane engendered by the Great Separation between religion and politics in the…
Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report—An introduction
It is no exaggeration to say that the religious diversity that characterized the Middle East for centuries is in precipitous…
The religious roots of ISIS
At Arc of the Universe, Daniel Philpott draws from the recent New York Times article, "ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape"…