Social Science Research Council

In a symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West came together last month to discuss the project of “rethinking secularism.” Today we are posting audio and a transcript of the October 22 discussion between Habermas and Taylor, moderated by Craig Calhoun, in which the two leading philosophers discuss the place of religion in the public sphere and whether there are differences in kind between religious and secular reasons. (Listen to the paper presentations that preceded this discussion here. Add your own voice to the discussion here.)

I argue that the moral narrative of modernity is a projection onto chronological time of a view of human moral and pragmatic self-transformation. This narrative, and the concrete projects it entails, runs into certain ubiquitous problems that arise from the material dimensions of human sociality and subjectivity. Protestantism was, historically, one major source of practices and concepts that express and try to control these problems. It was also a force for their circulation well beyond the Protestant, or even the religious, sphere as such.

What does the academic study of religion have to contribute to public discussions concerning Major Hasan’s religious identity? What do we know about religion and religious identity? We are worried about stereotypes and we are anxious, but what do we know?

Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported on a controversy that erupted over the decision by Missouri tax authorities to require yoga centers to collect and pay a sales tax on their classes. Yoga instructors have argued that they should be exempt from the tax “because the lessons include spiritual elements.” In this week’s off the cuff feature, we’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on the legal and cultural status of yoga and on the right of states to levy taxes on yoga centers.

If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind.

Professor Daniel Philpott is a leading theorist of global politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He is the author of the forthcoming Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, which proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework for peacebuilding in the wake of conflict.

Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination. The following is a short excerpt of the conversation, which is available for download in its entirety here (pdf). You can see video from the event at here & there.

In September, Harvey Cox retired after 44 years of teaching at Harvard Divinity School. Retirement, however, has not slowed him down. Last month saw the release of his latest book The Future of Faith, which, in the spirit of his 1965 classic The Secular City, dares to declare that a drastically different role for religion in society is close at hand.

By its very nature, mystery is much more difficult to speak about, and certainly to track.  But religious ritual claims to offer mystery as well as sociality. It claims to make the transcendent immanent, and transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of what is beyond our comprehension, control and use. We can point to it, sign it, and by doing so, evoke it. But that “beyond” is more than we can say, hear, touch, taste or even understand.

Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together yesterday in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.” In an electrifying symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West gave powerful accounts of religion in the public sphere. The Immanent Frame invites you to respond to the symposium presentations by submitting comments in the space below.

UPDATE: Listen to audio of the event here.