Each contributor [to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age] delivers a reading of Taylor’s work, helping to evaluate its…
Commentaries on our age
history
After secularization?
In their posts, Vincent Pecora and Jonathan Sheehan suggest imagining secularization as an open-ended, ongoing project. Neither doubts that something…
The poverty of atheism
Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call…
Muslim political history: two views from the West
In this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review, Max Rodenbeck has an essay on two recent books on Islam: Faith and…
Man dies again!
"Man dies again.” Or so might one entitle a tabloid version of Stefanos Geroulanos’s excellent work on the history of…
Thinking of Vincent Pecora, with Eric Voegelin in mind
Voegelin’s central, surprisingly Kantian thesis is that some recognition of transcendence is the precondition of open, self-reflexive inquiry. Founded on…
Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters
Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the…
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his…
Spirituality, entangled: An interview with Courtney Bender
Courtney Bender is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-chair of the SSRC’s Working Group on Spirituality,…
Glenn Beck’s history book club
What's the number one bestseller on Amazon.com? Give up? As of May 20, 2010, it was George Washington's Sacred Fire…