Karma is one of the most well-known concepts associated with Buddhism in the West. In many Asian countries where Buddhism…
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Essays
Revisited: Political religion and crises of legitimacy
August 14, 2025
In 2017, I argued that the concepts of civil and political religions help explain contemporary sociopolitical developments in Russia and the United States.
August 14, 2025
Karmic historiography
Algorithmic karma in digital samsara
August 13, 2025
I stand in line at the grocery store, my jittery trigger-thumb summoning successive apparitions of image, sound, and text that stream incessantly into my downcast eyes. They excite, terrify, amuse, and deaden.…
August 13, 2025
Karmic historiography
Karmic historiography
August 6, 2025
A lawyer friend explained it to me this way: Since the 1980s, lawyers with specialized expertise and exclusive relationships—especially those involved in high-stakes deals like mergers and acquisitions—have been generating irresistibly large…
August 6, 2025
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The Editors
Most-Read Essays of 2024

Check out The Immanent Frame‘s ten most-read essays of 2024! This year’s essays were featured in the forums “Ruinations: Violence in these times” and “Experimental books.” Others were standalone essays, previously published on TIF but appearing this year with new introductions, or published in 2024 for the first time. Scholars address wide-ranging topics—from thinking critically about the different […]
December 11, 2024
here & there
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The Editors
Fall 2024 Call for Individual Essays – US Politics and Religion

The Immanent Frame has been a leading platform for groundbreaking public scholarship on secularism and religion since its founding in 2007. This call invites essays that address US politics and religion, broadly construed, in contemporary or historical perspective. Essays need not address phenomena that occur specifically in the territorial United States. Global and comparative perspectives are […]
November 26, 2024
Essays
They tell the Bible so: On hermeneutical determinism
November 13, 2024
One of the largest religious schisms in American history has occurred in the last few years. Around one quarter of the 30,000 congregations in the United Methodist Church (UMC), the second-largest Protestant denomination in…
November 13, 2024
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