Last September, I sat down at UC-Berkeley with the eminent sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, for a discussion about religious…
Rethinking secularism and religion in the global age
history
The fanatical counterpublic
How are we to understand Taylor's own position between disengagement and "fanaticism"? Of course, he doesn't want to side with…
Akbar Ganji in conversation with Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor: If the human relation to religion and to God is not as shallow as the mainstream theory thinks,…
Attacking Mumbai
Whatever the global elements involved in these brutal events, from militant methods to media coverage, crucial is the fact that…
Restore us to fire
The leitmotif of old Bombay is its diversity. Populations with varied beliefs and languages were agglomerated by the British into…
Mind sciences and religious change in America
Like others in this discussion, I'm not sure that recent neurological studies will dramatically change contemporary religious belief or practice,…
A religious history of American neuroscience
Not long ago, researchers wired up the atheist Richard Dawkins with a helmet that would create magnetic fields partially simulating…
The headscarf and citizenship in Turkey
In Turkey, the headscarf is usually taken as an emblem of tradition and backwardness, and its removal from public life…
The politics of secularism in international relations
A survey of leading contemporary international relations (IR) journals published between 1980 and 1996 revealed that 6 out of 1,600…
The persistence of memory
Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Mircea Eliade’s novel Youth Without Youth opens with a montage of clocks woozily bending. These…