On June 24th, 2010, Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as leader of the Australian Labour Party and as Prime Minister of Australia. Since then, the Australian press has been at pains to emphasise the vast differences separating the two leaders. Religion quickly became a key theme. Days after she was sworn in, Gillard became the focus of a would-be scandal in the Australian press when during a radio interview she revealed that she did not believe in God and had no intention of participating in religious rituals to win over voters.  The difference with Rudd could not have been more stark.

Pecora writes that I claim his “use of the term ‘secularization’ must be secretly eschatological” and that he “cannot escape from transcendence.” Actually, I didn’t intend to make either charge. When I asked if Pecora’s idea of secularization as an ongoing, open-ended project was eschatological, it was a genuine question, not an accusation. Now I’m a little embarrassed because he seems to think that it was obvious that he did not intend the term that way at all. Still, not all the causes of my initial confusion have been resolved. Let me try to state them more clearly.

For many Minnesotans, religion is a private matter that shouldn’t be talked about—not even among friends. For others, it hardly makes sense to think of religion as public or private because it seems so obviously embedded in both spheres. As someone who has to talk about religion a lot, two rough groups emerge for me: on the one hand, there are the public non-theists; and on the other, there are those who talk about religion, whether or not they are actually religious themselves.

In between my research trips to Senegal and the Philippines, I will be staying in Cortona, Italy, for a two-week summer school on religion and democracy with the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM). . . . The IWM is hosting a remarkable blend of scholars and students grappling with many of the same questions that drive our SSRC DPDF After Secularization group: religion, democracy, the secular, and modernity.  The chance to spend a couple of weeks with scholars like Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Dipesh Chakrabarty—and in the Tuscan hills no less—is a little slice of grad student heaven.

n his most recent contribution to The Immanent Frame, “Waiting for Godot, who is either late or not coming at all“, Vincent Pecora provides a provocative response to posts by Alex Hernandez and Justin Reynolds, which question, criticize and reflect on Pecora’s distinction between “secularism” and “secularization” (and particularly his statement that “ ‘secularization’ is a conceptual improvement over ‘secularism’ ”).

As I depart from Senegal, a more important passing has taken place within the Mouride Sufi brotherhood.  Serigne Mouhamadou Lamine Bara Mbacké, Khalife general of the Mourides, died last Thursday.  For a student of religion and politics, the post-mortem patterns of partisan condolence have provided yet more evidence of the powerful place of the Mourides in Senegalese society.

What fascinates me about [the] language of purity and contamination is the extent to which it is mobilized in the service of both religious and secularist narratives. This is particularly true in the case of France’s republican culture of laïcité, as the recent controversy over the Islamic     headscarf—repeatedly figured as a scandalous threat to the purity of the secular public sphere—amply attests. . . . What is interesting is that both the religious and the laïque appeal to a discourse on purity and contamination and rely upon a similar narrative structure, invoking the rhetoric of purity to describe both an originary moment that has since been lost, and an eschatological ideal to be fulfilled at some point in the future.

In their posts, Vincent Pecora and Jonathan Sheehan suggest imagining secularization as an open-ended, ongoing project. Neither doubts that something described as “secular” is worth seeking. Given that a major goal of this DPDF program is to ask what might come “after secularization,” I find this a little curious—especially because it’s not clear why Pecora and Sheehan think that the term “secularization” is worth reclaiming or conceptually fine-tuning in the first place. What is particularly “secular” about the principles—openness to contingency, falsifiability, treating humans as ends and not means—that Pecora and Sheehan embrace? Do we believe that such principles are alien to religious or theological traditions? If so, why?

Postwar Yugoslavia was confronted with a rather difficult task: How to give meaning to a new state that was simultaneously the protectorate of religious and national difference but also a project that transcended these differences? Bogdan Bogdanovic’s work, largely focused on monuments commemorating the victims of fascism, was ideal for trying to give this project an architectural language.

An interesting debate is taking place in Egypt regarding a controversial court ruling that ordered the Coptic Orthodox Church to allow its members to divorce and remarry. Regardless of whether the court is robbing the Church of its religious freedom (as the Church claims) or whether the Church is robbing its members’ of their individual rights (as the court claims), these developments present a huge setback for advocates of meaningful political change in Egypt.

It’s hard to say how Hans Blumenberg would have responded to recent data troubling the secularization thesis other than to see in such revisionist accounts further confirmation of precisely this contingency in the future of the secular. Still, I can’t resist pointing out the irony implied by a confrontation between the Blumenbergian and the priests of secularization theory in light of our post-secular moment.  For isn’t the problem of the classical secularization thesis—its failure to deliver, both empirically in frustrated sociological models, and ideologically in the killing fields of various nationalisms—that of an eschatology deferred?

While in the past women’s human rights activists have admitted a certain skepticism about religion, my recent experience at the UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting and the US National Committee for UNIFEM annual meeting tell a slightly different story.  As I heard at several panel discussions, religious organizations are still seen by some as “strange bedfellows” in terms of serving as partners in work related to violence against women.  However, religious actors and organizations are increasingly being invited to the table and “religion” and “culture” are becoming an integral part of the conversation.  This makes me wonder. . . . what does a turn to these “strange bedfellows” of religion and culture do for women’s human rights?

Last week I wrote about the conversations I get into when I tell people what I do. Answering that I study religion usually leads to a conversation about it—a topic about as uncomfortable as politics during an election year. One of the first things people ask me in these conversations is what I believe. This question comes in a lot of forms, and every answer I give is an educated guess meant to quickly defuse any tensions. Sometimes I’m not particularly religious; other times I was raised Christian; and sometimes I’m simply an atheist.

When it comes to the Catholic Church these days, news headlines offer few opportunities for levity. I’m referring, of course, to the thorny problem of sex abuse in the Church. As a student of Catholicism, I’m evidently disturbed by the Church’s handling of the scandal, but I’m also deeply troubled by the tendency among those outside the Church to treat this as a specifically “Catholic problem,” as if it were the logical conclusion of clerical celibacy or some element of Catholic dogma.

Voegelin’s central, surprisingly Kantian thesis is that some recognition of transcendence is the precondition of open, self-reflexive inquiry. Founded on this recognition, he seeks to build “a new science of politics and history” capable of overcoming the dogmatic tendencies in “scientism.” He’s after, I think, something very similar to what Edward Said – and Vincent Pecora in his recent post – meant by the term “secular criticism.” If this is right, it raises the question of whether the “infinite” process Pecora recommends should be called “secularization” at all. Maybe God is less worth barring from the public realm than forms of dogmatic faith. It’s worth remembering that theology has its own resources for the fight against what Said calls “pseudo-religion.”

What makes a religious political party? The question is more than semantic in Senegal.  The constitution bars political parties based on religion or sect (Article 3.1), so when a young leader within Senegal’s Mouride Sufi brotherhood, Serigne Modou Kara Mbacké, formed a political party in 2004, the ban was put to a test.

What is secularization? This question raises the issue of what exactly religion and “the secular” are—terms that, as our discussions in San Diego and the blog posts so far have shown, defy simple description. Still, in purely formal terms, secularization might mean—and has meant—two different things. For some—Max Weber (in some of his writings) and modernization theorists—secularization means the demise of religious belief and practice, whatever they are, and the rise of “secularism.” For others, like Karl Löwith—a central figure in my own research on transatlantic debates over theological origins of historical consciousness in the early Cold War—it means the transfer of theological ideas or religious yearnings into secular forms and contexts. Thus the puzzle: is secularization the survival of religion in a different guise, or its demise?