Social Science Research Council

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.

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short essay, but I shall try to single out three facets of his extraordinary achievement which help throw light on his deserved fame and influence.

When the Dalai Lama visited Washington, D.C. last week, he didn’t stop at the White House, making this the first time since 1991 that the Tibetan leader has visited the capital without meeting with a sitting U.S. president. Aware of his departure from established precedent, President Obama nonetheless made the decision to postpone meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his November summit with Chinese head of state Hu Jintao. What does Obama’s decision say about his strategy regarding the protection of human rights and the competing demands of geopolitical gamesmanship? What do the decision and the strong reactions it has provoked say about the Dalai Lama’s authority as both a religious and a political leader? How does the intrinsic duality of his position play out on the international stage? “Off the cuff” responses from Robbie Barnett, Carole McGranahan, Edward Friedman, and Cameron David Warner.

John Lardas Modern, an assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College, draws on the Beat poets, phrenologists, prison reformers, and Moby-Dick to show why taking technology seriously forces us to think differently about the boundaries of religion. His article “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan” appeared in the December 2008 issue of Church History. His book Haunted Modernity; or, the Metaphysics of Secularism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

In 2002 we reported that the fraction of American adults with no religious preference doubled from 7 to 14 percent during the 1990s. Data from this decade show that the trend away from organized religion continues, albeit at a slower pace. Our analysis of the entire time series, presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 2009, led us to the conclusion that the trend probably started earlier than we had thought—probably around 1985, 1986, or 1987—and that our previous estimate of the rate of change was, consequently, too high.

In last week’s New York Times Sunday Styles section, Allen Salkin reported on the emergence of a “new wave” of spiritual practices and identities among young, urban, professional women. What are we to make of Salkin’s portrait of the self-styled leaders of “a new generation of self-empowerment”? Off the cuff responses to the article from Courtney Bender, Rev. Donna Schaper, Elizabeth McAlister, Mara E. Donaldson, Melani McAlister, Michele Dillon, Carl Raschke, and Kathryn Lofton.

Charles Taylor has argued that those of us living in North America and Europe are witnessing a shift in our social imaginary from a “Durkheimian” self-understanding, according to which political identity is tied to religious belonging, towards a “post-Durkheimian” view, in which the two are no longer seen as intrinsically linked. In the emerging dispensation, Taylor predicts, “it will be less and less common for people to be drawn into or kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity, or by the sense that they are sustaining a socially essential ethic.” Whatever its merits as an analysis of contemporary European self-understanding—and these are surely significant—Taylor’s reading strikes me as underdetermined by the American evidence…

Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.” He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.