Are we living in a post-secular world? That question has surged onto the academic agenda, marked by the increasing scholarly use of the notion of the “post-secular.” From the writings of Jürgen Habermas on the role of religion in public life to a host of more theoretical reflections on religion in contemporary society, the idea of the post-secular has acquired increasing currency in contemporary academic discussions.¹ The outpouring of books and journal articles on the topic signals an important shift in scholarly thinking about religion and secularism. Yet it should also give us pause; the term has at times been...

When Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit confreres arrived in China in the late sixteenth century, they encountered an intellectual culture full of sophisticated “teachings” (jiao), elaborated through centuries of scholarly discourse, and a life structured according to meticulously elaborated “rituals” (li). None this fit neatly into the categories these European priests used for articulating the beliefs and practices of their Catholic faith. The “teachings”—which included the teachings of the scholars (what we now call “Confucianism”), teaching of the Dao (which we now call Daoism), and the teachings the Buddha (which we now call Buddhism)—were not necessarily about supernatural...

Few aspects of social life seem more entangled within the project of moder­nity than religion. This is evident, if nowhere else, in the current far-rang­ing discussions about religions, the secular, and the post-secular within the social sciences and humanities. But while such entanglements now seem self-evident, this was not the case even fifteen years ago.¹ What has trans­pired to make religion such a lodestone, and such an interesting problematic for the social sciences once more? What, furthermore, might sociology con­tribute to these renewed discussions?² Dewey’s phrases encourage us to con­sider answering this question with an approach that takes religion’s entan­glements...

Émile Durkheim envisioned sociology as a “moral science.” Today, this phrase jars the ear. Among sociologists, at least, it is apt to elicit bewilderment, bemusement, denial, or dismissal. “What could Durkheim have possibly meant by it?” “Durkheim was a little woolly-headed, wasn’t he?” “Aren’t ethics and science two quite different enterprises?” “Frankly, what use do we postmoderns have for ‘morality’ anyway?” “What nonsense! You can’t derive an ought from an is!” Yet that is precisely what Durkheim proposed to do—at least sometimes. His goal was not just to study morality scientifically—a goal that at least some contemporary sociologists...

It needs no proof that the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States represented in the eyes of many “a magical transformative moment . . . the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great collective dream,” in other words, seismic event.”¹ And what, mostly in Europe, was called the “Obama effect”—including its, perhaps, inevitable disappointments—has not ceased cause wonder as to the fate of the political in what is not just a post-9/11 of global politics but, in the eyes of many, also the dreamlike, if...

In this chapter I develop a number of critical reflections on the analysis of in both contemporary sociology and social philosophy. This argument has several interconnected components. Sociologists and more especially philosophers have focused too much on religious belief and too little on In this respect, I return to a defense of Émile Durkheim, who can interpreted as saying that belief is always embedded in collective practices that they become problematic and uncertain only when there are major in practice. I set this contrast between philosophical understanding belief and sociological analysis of practice in the context of developing a that...

In this landmark workIdeas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology,Edmund undertook a thought experiment intended as a kind of limit case that elucidate the nature of consciousness. While I have no investment particular claims, the strategy is suggestive. Imagine, Husserl (rather suggested, the complete annihilation of the world. Imagine the utter of materiality: not just buildings and trees, but animals and planets. the obliteration of the earth, the eradication of material stuff, annihilation of our bodies. What would be left? Could consciousness such a catastrophe? Oddly enough, Husserl answered “yes” to such “while the being of consciousness, of any...

The questions I explore in this essay stem from an inquiry concerning the advent of the academic secular. While it may seem utterly obvious that the modern research university is secular in its constitution and in its ethos, seldom is this constitution expressly reasoned, nor is its logic clearly articulated. In fact, there is much obscurity surrounding the historical and theoretical grounding of the secularity of the academy. This obscurity could be partly, perhaps greatly, responsible for the present state of loquacious confusion manifest in our generally erratic handling of the subject of religion. For, in the last few decades,...

The university has long been perceived as one of the most secular precincts American society. In the academy and the media, the secularization narrative dominates accounts of religion’s place in higher education.¹ Yet recent suggests that the secularization narrative may have overstated extent to which universities have marginalized the teaching and practice religion. Such scholarship points to the survival and growth of the study of religion as well as the vitality of campus religious life. It what historian Martin Marty dubs “complaints and whimpers” about went wrong with Christian scholarship.”²

Yet there is strong evidence that something close to the...

Jürgen Habermas is undoubtedly the leading social theorist currently alive. body of work is probably more familiar to philosophers than sociologists, especially in the United States, where there is a long tradition of deep toward abstract theorizing. His writings, nonetheless, along with of the late Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have provided a tremendous amount of intellectual energy to new generations of sociologists. Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, Habermas has tackled questions focusing on the nature of, and complications to, participatory in an increasingly bureaucratic and consumer society in which the of capitalism typically push back against and triumph...

Largely as a result of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subject of religion to the Western social science agenda with considerable force. In immediate aftermath of (and obviously prompted by) the attacks, Jürgen argued that we have entered into a “post-secular” age,¹ in which of religion have to be addressed by liberal democracies in a more manner than had been the case theretofore. Meanwhile, Charles has insisted in his celebrated recent bookA Secular Agethat we live in which the intrinsically secularizing “immanent frame” has become reasonable option and perhaps even the “default setting” for many in...

One of the virtues of Charles Taylor’s work has been to show that we have become secular notagainstreligion butbecauseof religion. Already in his numerous essays, collected in two volumes, Taylor had written about what he called the “expressivist tradition” and the Romantic tradition of valorizing the subjective and inwardness.¹ In his 1989Sources of the Self,Augustine plays a pivotal role in the emergence of this expressivist and Romantic tradition that then gives way to the culture of authenticity.² For Taylor, expressivism and authenticity are inextricably linked to the “moral topography” of inwardness that he claims...

Secularism is often treated as a sort of absence. It’s what’s left if religion fades. It’s the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. But then it is seen as somehow in itself neutral. This is misleading. We need to see secularism as a presence. It is something, and therefore not entirely neutral, and in need of elaboration and understanding. It shapes not only religion but also culture more broadly. Whether we see it as an ideology, as a worldview, as a stance toward religion, as a constitutional approach, or as simply an aspect of some other project—of science...