Essays

Instead of separation of state and religion, Al drew on the history of established religions in Europe to advocate the “twin tolerations”: a form of mutual toleration between religion and...

The Conservative Human Rights Revolution traces the origins of the European human rights system from the Hague peace conferences before the First World War to the adoption of the European...

Six short reflections contribute to an ongoing conversation about the value of history to any analysis of secularism, religion, and the interactions between the two.

Why has public criticism of the German churches for their conduct during the Nazi era been disproportionately directed at the minority Catholic Church and not at the majority Protestant churches?

I am a comparative historian of early Christianity who reads widely in and engages in academic forums around new religious movements and popular and local religious forms, both contemporary and...

It is a widely held view that the juridical and political management of religion should be grounded in fundamental normative truth. Catholic communitarian and natural law doctrines are among the...

To practice anthropology is to accept an implicit temporal double bind: We think we write ethnography, but frequently our expositions and analyses have become history by the time they achieve...

Does it make a difference to think of ritual language such as prayer in terms of a relation between practice and performance? I do not mean this in the sense...

A great many theorists have argued that precisely what makes the modern world “modern” is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Even theorists who have challenged...

"It has long been known that Muslims constitute the proverbial public enemy number one for right-wing populists across the Western world. What is new and relatively unprecedented in the Norwegian...

The matter of the love-hate relationship between psychoanalysis and public life has an unexpected link to the complexities of secularism in the United States. Officially, psychoanalysis has been dismissed as...

Studying Salafism is important not just for analyzing jihadist movements or clarifying twentieth-century Muslim history, but also for better understanding the role of religion in contemporary life. What claims to...