In the interest of informing our English-speaking readers about recent public debates involving questions of religious difference and public life in a transatlantic context, The Immanent Frame presents the translation into English of…
Essays
The Immanent Frame publishes essays reflecting on current events, debates in the field, and other public matters relevant to scholarship in secularism and religion.
The Immanent Frame typically publishes essays by invitation only. To see our open calls for content, click here.
To read essays from our archive that are written by scholars introducing or reviewing a recently published book, click here and here.
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Book introductions 
by
Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela Klassen and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Ekklesia: An introduction
by
Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela Klassen and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State takes the tenacious rubric of “church and state” and examines it through a series of revealing things: treaties, royal proclamations, bibles, staffs, amulets, corpses, juries, and trophy heads. Working from three sites within the Americas—Brazil, Canada, and the United States—we argue for the importance of thinking of church and state, or what we call churchstateness, not simply as interrelated institutions or theoretical categories inherited from abroad. Instead, we also think of them as overlapping polities and powerfully twinned concepts kept alive in distinctive ways in the purportedly secular democratic nation-states across the so-called New World. ... Framing our essays with a jointly-written introduction that engages with Eric Santner, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Judith Butler, among others, we focus on questions of “the people” as variously convened in democratic societies.
Book introductions 
by
James Chappel
Catholic Modern: An introduction
by
James Chappel
The Church, like no other institution of its size, is beholden to its past. That past is, however, often misunderstood. As scholars and citizens, therefore, we lack a solid understanding of what sorts of tools the Church employs to engage with the modern world, and where they come from. Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church offers a new account of how the Catholic Church evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and in turn offers a new understanding of the dilemmas faced by the Church today. The question asked by the book is a simple one: when, why, and how did the Catholic Church become modern? Building on discussions in The Immanent Frame and elsewhere, I suggest that, when it comes to religious institutions, “modern” can have an analytically precise meaning. It should not be equated with liberal, tolerant, progressive, atheist, or democratic. Modernity is, very often, none of those things. “Modern” can refer, instead, to what readers of TIF might call the “secular condition”: one in which religion is safely sequestered into something called the “private sphere.”