http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:22:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/02/14/the-rules-of-the-games/ http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/02/14/the-rules-of-the-games/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:57 +0000 Mark Lilla http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/02/14/the-rules-of-the-games/ The Stillborn God begins as a book about two chess games. Part of the book explains, in all too cursory fashion, how the second chessboard came to be built after a stalemated game on the first board (Christian political theology) descended into violence among the players. But the real drama is in the analysis of strategies on the new board, as David Hollinger has seen. There were of course many such strategies, each having its own background, and one could write a history of how each and every one of them developed, who used them in which historical contexts, and the like. I have not done that. Rather, I have focused episodically and analytically on a few grandmasters whose strategies stand out as having advanced the game and revealed its inner possibilities: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel.]]> http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/02/14/the-rules-of-the-games/feed/ 3 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/04/our-historical-sonderweg/ http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/04/our-historical-sonderweg/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:00:02 +0000 Mark Lilla http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/04/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 discussion. I’ve already posted a separate comment on José Casanova’s thorough remarks, to clear up some misunderstandings. Here I’ll try to respond first to the overlapping concerns raised by Winnifred Sullivan, James Smith, and Elizabeth Hurd in their generous contributions. (Nancy Levene’s arrived too late to be included for now.) My Columbia colleague Gil Anidjar’s “review in three parts” is different in tone, and needs special treatment. So I have two responses: one in narrative mode, the other in mock-lyrical mode. [...]]]> http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/04/our-historical-sonderweg/feed/ 5