Noah Salomon begins his work with the provocative statement that the “state may have failed according to the criteria of…
Tainted love
political theory
Mere Civility—A reply
"First, I must thank each of the contributors to this forum for their more than merely civil responses to my…
Mere Civility and Jeremiah Wright
Reporters who covered the Jeremiah Wright controversy during the 2008 United States presidential campaign would have benefited from reading Mere…
Mere Civility—An introduction
At the height of the 2016 American presidential election, a colleague asked whether I was worried that my forthcoming book…
Post-Doctoral Research Associate: Public Life and Religious Diversity
The Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University has announced a new position: Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Political…
The Fantastic Mr. Hobbes
Some readers of Minding the Modern have been surprised to find my account so firmly critical of Thomas Hobbes on will…
Three approaches to the study of religion
Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? In this post, I briefly set out three distinct approaches to the…
The context of religious pluralism
Akeel Bilgrami's article, “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” is an important and welcome contribution on a topic that has acquired…
Conference: Reworking Political Concepts
On Friday-Saturday, Feb. 3-4, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University will host Reworking Political Concepts II: A…
Affect vs. global totality
The tricky thing about global imaginaries unlike other social imaginaries is the issue of totality. Whereas other kinds of social…