Clik here to view.
The other shore
Developed and elaborated by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and others, the Great Separation dictated that for the purposes of political philosophy and political argument all appeals to higher revelation would be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Our historical Sonderweg
My thanks to all those who have taken the time to respond to The Stillborn God, with sharper comments than I’ve received so far in published reviews, and to The Immanent Frame for organizing the...
View ArticleWhat if?
It seems to me that Chris Nealon and Colin Jager are onto something important when they remind us that there exists a “left-secular structure of feeling” that too easily overlooks critique’s abiding...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Liberal Protestantism the key
I enter this discussion of The Stillborn God very late because by the time I was invited to participate I had already written a review of the book for London Review Of Books, and thought I should not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Two books, oddly yoked together
Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God feels like two books, oddly yoked together. One is a fascinating study, which traces a post-Enlightenment tradition of theorizing about religion starting from an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The rules of the games
If an author feels misunderstood by one reader, he’s apt to think it’s the reader’s fault. If he’s misunderstood by more readers, and in the same way, the fault probably lies with him. After reading...
View ArticleResistance, critique, religion
Justin Neuman’s stimulating last post encouraged me to reread the debate asking “Is Critique Secular?” from the beginning, and in doing so I began to wonder what would happen to the discussion if we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Antihumanism and religion
In 2009, Yeshiva University, affiliated with the modern Orthodox movement in Judaism, was the site of a series of discussions on the issue of homosexuality. They began in February, when a student...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Commentaries on our age
It is an honor to review Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, the volume of essays on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, edited by Craig Calhoun, Michael Warner, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. Each...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Atheism and antihumanism as intellectual-historical objects
I begin this post by posing straightaway the questions that will guide my argument. In what way can atheism and antihumanism be posed and understood in intellectual history? In what sense do they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Catholicism, conservatism, and antihumanist politics
Rarely do I learn more from a scholarly book than I have from Stefanos Geroulanos’s An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Geroulanos’s central thesis is compelling but simple:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An atheism a theologian can love
“Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist.” So claimed Michel Foucault in his intellectual archaeology of modernity, The Order of Things. Indeed, “man,” he continued, is a quite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Secularism and atheism: a discussion at the Institute for Advanced Study
Stefanos Geroulanos’s An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought—the subject of an ongoing forum here at The Immanent Frame—was taken up for discussion last week by participants in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remembering a different evangelicalism
Celebrating the ideological diversity of contemporary evangelicalism, Marcia Pally heralds the advent of a religious non-right. Shattering stereotypes of a monolithic conservatism, she performs a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is absolute secularity conceivable?
Is absolute secularity conceivable? The question arises from the paradoxical intuition that the secularization thesis is simultaneously both right and muddled. Perhaps the most fundamental problem with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Minding hermeneutics and history
Minding the Modern is unusual in several respects. It is organized historically but anti-historicist, methodologically self-aware yet critical of “method,” and reliant on close literary readings while...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is secularism still Christian?
In January 2013, hundreds of thousands of French Catholics marched down the streets of Paris to protest “Marriage for All,” a bill introduced by the government a few months earlier to open marriage and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Weimar Century
The international turn in intellectual history, which David Armitage announced in 2014, has evolved into a surge of publications on the global, international, and transnational aspects of the history...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mere Civility—An introduction
At the height of the 2016 American presidential election, a colleague asked whether I was worried that my forthcoming book on civility might be overtaken by events. President Obama’s constant calls for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vectors of translation
Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is both admirably ambitious in its quest to map “the topography of modern selfhood” and meticulous in the stories it threads together in this process. What the book...
View Article
