In this forum, “indigeneity” faces off against European “settler colonialism.” If the twenty-first century mode of conceptualizing indigenous resistance to…
Fluid indigeneity: Indians, Catholicism, and Spanish law in the mutable Americas
colonialism
Sacrality, secularity, and contested indigeneity
Indigenous peoples articulate their indigeneity within the political and legal language of secularism, even as it renders certain claims to…
Secular Christian power and the spiritual invention of nations
In the Americas, missionary colonialism prospered on the sharp edge of secular Christian power. Cutting up land with a blade…
New itineraries in the study of Islam and the state
From Wael Hallaq’s The Impossible State to Shahab Ahmad’s What is Islam?, recent scholarship on Islam and the state has…
Beyond the Secular State? Secularism, Empire, and Hegemony
Monday, November 14, 6:15 to 8:00 p.m. 403 Jerome Greene Hall, Columbia University Three orders of questions regarding secularism—genealogical, philosophical,…
The Politics of Islamic Law: An introduction
My new book, The Politics of Islamic Law, presents an approach to the study of religion, comparative politics and law…
Beyond the Catholic-Protestant divide
The epigraph of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation comes from an essay that Jacques Maritain wrote for the Review of…
Colonialism’s religious domain
Recently I am struck by the ambiguity of the concept of the religious. Reading Linda Heuman’s review of Robert Bellah’s…
Reading religious freedom in Sri Lanka
As several contributors to this forum have pointed out, legal provisions regarding religious freedom do not emerge from history fully…
The problem of translation: A view from India
What is the politics of religious freedom? For the past decade and more, those who would like to see the…