In expounding his misgiving about the humanism I proposed, Uday Mehta seeks---I think with some strain---to find an incompatibility between…
Secularism: Its Content and Context
In “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” an SSRC Working Paper, Akeel Bilgrami addresses two questions: first, the meaning of secularism and second, its justification and implementation. Engaging Charles Taylor’s recent calls for a “radical” redefinition of secularism, he offers an alternative conceptualization of the category, while also addressing Taylor’s deep concerns about the politics of secularism for our time. According to Bilgrami, secularism has its point and meaning not in a decontextualized philosophical argument but in the historical and contextual specificities in which it is applied. In the end, secularism “needs, not replacement, but merely proper implementation, in order to get us ‘beyond toleration.’”
A different notion of fraternity
In his interesting and engaging essay, Uday Mehta addresses, with some genuine feeling of qualm, a large, concluding theme in…
Genealogy and plurality
Simon During’s essay begins with a taxonomy that is harmlessly at odds with my own classification. He uses the term…
The possibilities of history
Colin Jager projects the virtues of his own reading of me onto my essay when he describes it as possessed…
Secularism: Some concepts and distinctions
I am very grateful to the many commentators on my essay “Secularism: It’s Content and Context” for their instructive and…
Truth and fraternity?
Akeel Bilgrami’s essay is important and ambitious. Its importance lies in part in making clear what secularism is and should…
Hope, tragedy, and prophecy
It is hard not to be convinced by Akeel Bilgrami’s careful, patient, and generous exposition in “Secularism: Its Content and…
There is no such thing as a monoculture
“We develop in multi-cultural and multi-religious societies. To say this is to state the obvious. There is no religiously homogeneous…
Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue
Akeel Bilgrami’s paper is very rich; I cannot speak to all its arguments. I focus on his principal concern: his…
Religion and state secularization
In discussing secularization, it has become conventional to note that the concept refers to various processes, of which three are…