My own interest in the relationship between the religious and the secular centers less around the way the former gave way to the latter than on how the latter has often been created in no small measure out of elements of the religious, elements that emerge as much from a relaxation of its constraints as from an outright repudiation of them. Thus what to other specialists may appear in actual processes of secularization to be a dismissal or negation of the religious often presents itself to cultural historians and theorists to be more than not a reconstruction of the world out of some of those same interpretive and imaginative activities that religion itself set free and that must now be brought into play if some alternative vision of life, experience, or the really real is to take its place.

Robert Bellah has articulated what I mean to identify about this process in his magisterial new book Religion in Human Evolution, where he insists repeatedly that the history of this process, both from one human stage to another—the mimetic, to the mythic, to the theoretic—and from one religious formation to another—the archaic, to the tribal, to the axial—reveals that each stage or phase succeeds what proceeded it not by supplanting or superseding it but by reorganizing and readapting it in new ways. Axial religion does not destroy tribal or archaic religion but makes itself out of elements of the former two that it reconfigures for its own purposes. Hence the emergence of new forms does not require, and cannot take place, by their simple disembedding from older ones. Earlier stages of religious development, as in all evolutionary schemes, are “not lost,” as Bellah argues with the assistance of Merlin Donald, “but only restructured under new conditions.”

This has inevitably drawn me to think again about the argument that Charles Taylor has made in his own magisterial A Secular Age and then restated in the volume in his essay on “Western Secularity.” His is an argument of immense sophistication and complexity that is not insensible of the way the secular is made out of components of the religious, and particularly its interpretive and imaginative energies when they are released from their embeddedness in theological structures, but I am persuaded that his way of modeling this process has cultural and historical problems that Peter Katzenstein’s essay from the same volume on “Civilizational States, Secularism, and Religion” conceptually and historically avoids.

Taylor is clearly aware that the terms “secular” and “religious” have very different meanings in different traditions, which is precisely Talal Asad’s point in his discussion on blasphemy in Rethinking Secularism, but Taylor’s essential proposition that from the seventeenth century onward in the West the secular became a domain understood to be inhospitable to any claim made in the name of transcendence, “that the lower, immanent or secular, order is all that there is and that the higher, or transcendent, is a human invention,” is, at least from a cultural and historical perspective, seriously problematic, if not misleading. Yet before turning to what I find troubling about Taylor’s account of the relation between the religious and the secular in Western spirituality, let me say something first about the narrative Taylor is trying in important ways to correct.

That narrative is a coming-of-age story which has most recently been expressed in one of two ways. In the first, which is found in the work of the late American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, the secular is the result of a process of de-divinization that began, initially, with metaphysical idealism’s attempt to relocate the sphere of ultimate reality not beyond but within human experience; then led to Romanticism’s claim that if ultimate reality is now immanent rather than transcendent, its meanings can be described in more than one vocabulary; and eventually wound up with pragmatism’s assertion that these different vocabularies are ultimately no more than different ways of expressing what we need but only sometimes get. In the second narrative, really genealogy, of the secular, this sequence of historical transformations follows a course charted by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, where the love of God gave way, first, in the seventeenth century, to the love of truth, until the love of truth gave way, by the end of the eighteenth century, to the quasi-divinity of the self, and the idealist or Romantic love of the self succumbed, toward the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, to the realization, variously phrased by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that now nothing can be worshipped as divine, since everything, in effect, is a product of contingencies. In short, the world has not only lost all its transcendent reference but has been emptied of intrinsic significance.

Taylor’s object is to challenge this narrative by complicating it, and he complicates it by showing that the move from a transcendentalist spiritual perspective associated with Late Medieval Latin Christianity to an immanentist spiritual perspective by the seventeenth century was made possible because of the adaptation of religious ideas about the porous character of selfhood to a to a more buffered sense of the self. Here a new religious perspective is being partially remade out of components of the old, but for Taylor the process is one of irremediable loss rather than gain. The modern self is not only dissociated from the realm of transcendence associated with the Late Middle Ages but is now disposed to view religion itself as but one choice among others in the new wholly immanent sphere where, at least for many evangelicals in America, as Alan Wolfe and others have argued, the spiritual challenge is not to get right with God but to get God right with, or for, the self.

While I lack the space to do justice to Taylor’s many-layered explanation of this process, its difficulties become clear in his discussion of the notion of “enchantment,” which he, with Max Weber, takes to be the differentiating essence of Western Christian spirituality before it began what he describes as its “long march to secularism.” The problem with Taylor’s treatment of enchantment is that it is exceptionalist and, at least in the metaphor he uses here, too unidirectional, homogenous, and degenerative. By exceptionalist I mean that Taylor treats enchantment, or the experience of living in what he calls a “magical universe,” as something limited primarily to Christians alone and dependent on the kind of theological transcendentalism that Taylor posits as its precondition. But it is comparatively easy to argue, as Bellah has, for example, that if the experience of enchantment can be said to have been definitively expressed in a well known passage about the fullness of Being from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative,” it has also been expressed in virtually the same terms by former Czech President Vaclav Havel in one of his remarkable letters from prison before he became the leader of the Velvet Revolution. Enchantment in response to a universe experienced as suffused with a sense of divine presence can as easily be evoked, some might argue, by the most abstract natural landscapes of the great nineteenth-century English painter John Constable as by some of the Southwestern canvases of Georgia O’Keefe. The sense of living as a porous self open to the infinite above is, by personal testimony, as easily accessible to astro-physicists (or anyone else capable of reckoning on this scale) who can contemplate a universe composed of up to five hundred billion galaxies like our own Milky Way, which is itself composed of hundreds of billions of stars such as our own Sun, as it can be by ancient Christians, Zoroastrians, or other cosmologists. Taylor might reply that these representations and experiences of enchantment are, at best, intermittent and do not derive from habitation in a spirit or Being-filled world, but surely no one, including saints in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, lived in a continuously enchanted world open to the fullness of Being except in moments, and they needed all the trappings of ritual, symbols, music, and the visual to do so.

Indeed, in the late Middle Ages one of the explicit purposes of Christian art was to assist communicants in developing and preserving a religious sense they were always in danger, even the most pious, of losing. Take, for example, the relationship between Quattrocento painting and Early Modern Roman Catholicism in fifteenth-century Italy. Such painting existed not only, or even mainly, to reflect spiritual concerns but also, as Michael Baxendall has demonstrated, to enrich and augment, and thus change, them however subtly. The artist was interested in doing more than depicting religious material on canvas; he was even more eager to invite the beholder to reflect on it in a specifically religious manner. In other words, the artist’s aim was not merely illustrative or even exegetical but evocative. His public did not need what it already possessed; what it needed, in Clifford Geertz’s words, “was an object rich enough to see it in, rich enough, even, in seeking it, to deepen it.”

Geertz is here drawing on a view of culture, and particularly of the role of the imagination in culture, which assumes that culture in its more creative dimensions is not additive but generative, not merely transcriptive but provocative, that it changes the thing it engages and in ways that are very difficult to map or narrate in linear or sequential form. Despite Taylor’s abundant qualifications, his account of the transformations in the relations between religion and the secular is too episodic and successive, as if the break between the transcendental and immanental was sharp, successive, and final. Taylor would—and does—reply that German and English Romantics were among those who attempted to recover a sense of unmediated Being, but he believes they were doomed from the start because they were already working within what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” But just how immanent was the frame assumed by Romantics in the West if it deserves the description M.H. Abrams definitively gave it as “natural supernaturalism?” In any case, this is a cosmology that has lived a vigorous afterlife in the modern poetry of everyone from Rainer Marie Rilke to Paul Verlaine, and Wallace Stevens to A.R. Ammons.

Second, his presentation of Latin Christianity is too uniform and, for want of a better term, sanitary. What of the masses of people who lived on the edges of this system, often in utterly wretched conditions, or perhaps within its center, but clung to earlier forms of archaic, tribal, and clanish religion that were vernacular, profane, folk, or improvised? I can remember my former colleague at the University of Chicago, the great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, continually complaining to a faculty that made much of its own intellectual strength in the history of Christianity that there was too little history in it. What was being left out of most traditional accounts of Christianity, despite Peter Brown, were the irregular metaphysics, the disruptive logics, the unruly heterodoxies, and the powerful paganisms of people who may have been subjected to the theological and institutional governance of Latin Christendom but who at the same time worshipped their own, as the Anglican prayer refers to them, “ghoulies, ghosties and goblins.” Even more likely, as well as distracting and clearly divisive, was the presence of the carnivalesque, the parodistic, the perverse, the subversive, the sacrilegious, the scatological, the entire realm of Gargantua and Pantagruel, of Rabelaisian, Bakhtian excess that was always threatening to disturb the noise of solemn assemblies and crack the dome of the sacred canopy.

Third and finally, Taylor’s argument conforms to the subtraction theory even as it disavows it—secularism is not only different from religion but less. Where secularism emerges in Taylor’s narrative, religion not only changes but is fatefully, or at least emotionally and existentially, diminished. But that, I would suggest, is not exactly how it happened. The religious and the secular have not only coexisted in their modern formations—Taylor wouldn’t disagree—but actually adjusted to, and profited from, the rearrangements and adjustments required for co-existence with the other. Such was clearly the case with the United States, which is why so many religious scholars consider America to have been the one Western exception to the rule that secularism displaces religion rather than the exception that proves the rule that, as Peter Katzenstein argues, “secularization and religion…were deeply entangled at the outset of the modern state system and have remained so ever since…and the sociological turn in international-relations theory makes it possible to deploy now commonly accepted categories of analysis—culture, identity, norm, idea, ideology—to probe once more the connections between secularism and religion in international politics.”

Katzenstein’s thesis is that we will not fully understand how secularisms and religions intermingle in global politics—and I would add global social life—until we revise our understanding of how such matters are determined culturally in considerable part by civilizational, and not merely by religious or secular, processes. Here he turns to Randall Collins’s notion of civilizations as zones of prestige which radiate outward to create networks of attraction and repulsion. Rather than viewing civilizations and their components as cultural codes to be deciphered, Collins construes them as sets of relationships and activities that exert magnetism because of the dialogues, debates, and disagreements at their center, thus attracting admirers, challenging uniformity, and stimulating creativity and change. Hence the differences and conflicts around which they organize collective life can become at least as determinative and influential as the structures of assent and consent by which they govern their relations. Emulation and rejection of particular zones of prestige—religion, science, the public sphere, aesthetics—within or between civilizational systems can be deeply entwined, which creates the possibility of cultural commensurabilities being created across civilizational formations that are otherwise quite different. This creates what Katzenstein calls a “polymorphic globalism” in which “various intersections of secularisms and religions are created through never-ending processes of mutual cooperation, adaptation, coordination, and conflict.”

Does this mean that this globalism will be more secular than religious? Hardly. Think merely of the liberal, democratic sentiments that organized political resistance in Tahrir Square (along with a good deal of collective feeling about just being fed up) and the Islamist politics that have replaced it. Or, the possibility of a Rick Santorum Presidency in the United States. Or, better, the reason why the civilization of Latin Christendom was first able to unite, according to Karl Deutsch, and then fated to split. His argument that the spiritual, political, and cultural unity of medieval Christendom—defined by a common Latin language, the legal and spiritual authority of the Pope, the governance structures of the Holy Roman Empire, the military and missionary adventures of the Crusades, the styles of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture—was a transitory rather than seminal stage in history, and was destroyed by the very forces that gave rise to it, couldn’t be further from Taylor’s explanation. Drawing on a model of cultural commensurabilities and overlaps that function as networks of prestige, attraction, and coordination, Deutsch asserts that the economic foundation of the international civilization of Latin Christendom was based on a scarcity of goods, services, and personnel that enabled the growth of a thin web of supranational trading companies sharing language, customs, laws, traditions, family connections, and religion. Capable of traveling over long distances, these trading companies eventually created a superficial internationalism knit together by commerce, intellectual life, politics, and faith. Initially involving three civilizations and two trading peoples, Latin Christianity by the thirteenth century had prevailed over the challenges of Byzantine civilization, Islam on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere, the Jewish diaspora, and Viking conquests, but was then compelled to face its own demise as increasing contacts among village, manor, town, and sect enabled the rate of sectarian division and then regional migration to outpace the rate of international assimilation. What followed was the loss of the thin internationalism provided by Latin Christianity in favor of a more polymorphous regional and creedal differentiation to which modern nationalism subsequently gave rise, but only because the nation and its imperial aspirations could as easily become a vessel for religious enchantments and control as the seemingly more religion-based and ecclesiastically-centered civilization it replaced.

This brings me back to some of the ideas with which I started where, from a cultural perspective, it would appear that the transition from the religious to the secular is less accurately described or modeled as a structure of displacement and substitution than of recovery and adaptation. There is and has been marked change, to be sure, but to go back to Bellah’s discussion of the evolution of religion itself, it is not most accurately figured as a sharp break with the past so much as a repossession and rearrangement of it under new circumstances.

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

Edward E. Curtis, IV, Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Gender and Religion, Arizona State University

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine

John Lardas Modern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marhsall College

Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

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 Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

One of the best books I read over the summer was William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence, which argues that it is by constructing “religion” as inherently divisive and prone to violence—as something to be quarantined, expelled, or defeated by means of state power—that the secular state legitimates itself. Violence is projected outward, onto the barbarians outside the wall, thereby deflecting attention from the violence inherent in the nation-state itself.

In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, another of the books I read this summer, Wendy Brown argues that the gradual detachment of sovereignty from the nation-state under conditions of globalization motivates increasingly aggressive appeals  to theological power. But since the state cannot contain the religions it mobilizes—these are generally transnational, breaching the very borders the state seeks to defend—such appeals only hasten the erosion of its sovereignty.

Is “religion” the invented problem to which the nation-state claims to provide the solution—something to be walled out? Or is it the very ground of the state’s (contested) legitimacy—something to be walled in? If “religion” functions ideologically as both the imagined exterior of the “secular” state and the imagined interior of its national life, it should come as no surprise that debates over the proper “place” of this protean formation show no sign of abating.

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University

Another summer, and another level of madness is revealed in American public life. Perhaps inevitably, given my research interests, I have responded to this summer din by making less time for my explorations of jazz and American religions, turning again to the discursive formations of American political religions (okay, not completely: I also conducted immensely rewarding interviews with George Lewis, Ned Rothenberg, Ellery Eskelin, and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, among others). In my attempts to elaborate a genealogy of the rhetorics of persecution and victimizations in political religions, I have immersed myself in David Barton’s manifestos, James Dobson’s jeremiads-cum-child-rearing manuals, and anti-Sharia statutes. But when not watching Barton’s video chats about Founder piety and reading Islamophobic legislation, my thinking about technologies, assertions of victimization, information densities, and emotions has been stimulated greatly this summer by several sources.

Nearly two years after Mary-Jane Rubenstein recommended Michel Serres’ Genesis to me, I finally got around to this wondrous meditation on noise, multitude, and reason. Occupying a genre all its own, Serres’ slim volume theorizes turbulence, tombs, crowds, and apparitions, all of which helps give shape and language to the sheerly overwhelming experience of living in our common din. Nearly as suggestive was Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint, which I was also long overdue to read. A dazzling study of how “[a] certain circularity structures an intimate public,” Berlant reads the complex proximity of agonisms and affective space, fantasies of normalcy and blaring outrage, suffering and sentimentality. But perhaps most provocative, and unexpectedly so, was my latest rereading of Melville’s Billy Budd and Other Stories. We know, of course, of Melville’s abiding preoccupation with metaphor and illusion as the engines of our self-understanding. But as I pondered Rick Perry’s prayers, Michelle Bachmann’s heated promise to reduce gas prices to two dollars a gallon, and the fervent imaginations of Barack Obama’s demoniac misdeeds that seem now ubiquitous, I was entranced by “The Piazza” and “The Encantadas” specifically. We read of illusions, as sailors push away from social convention—and the obligations of shared space and vision—into the realm of the fantastic. Indeed, one of these anonymous sailors says to the exotic, perplexing Marianna, “Yours are strange fancies,” to which Marianna replies, “They but reflect the things.” And of these fancies, we read in “The Encantadas” of how “the stage of politics in this unhappy nation may be somewhat imagined, from the circumstances that all who were not of the body-guard were downright plotters and malignant traitors.” It is hard to avoid the truth that we live choked by the “strange fancies” of others, their very evident thingness the embodiment of the fantastic that defines us.

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Edward E. Curtis, IV, Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Some of the books that I read this summer were for my fall course on Islam and Modernity. I breezed through sociologist Charles Kurzman’s new book, The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists. Kurzman writes an effective polemic for educated readers that simultaneously takes on the conservative/liberal belief that Muslim terrorism is a huge problem and the leftist argument that if the U.S. only changed its foreign policy there wouldn’t be any Muslim terrorism. I hope the book has the kind of impact to which it aspires in the world of the D.C. think-tank.  Another of my books, Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East, is a readable account of the ways that Orientalism has affected U.S. scholarship and foreign policy concerning Muslims and Arabs. In The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World, a book written primarily for students who don’t know much about Islam, Mohammed Ayoob debunks the idea that Islam is both religion and state, or din wa dawla, as many Islamists and orientalists argue. Most of the textbook uncovers the many differences of opinion, political strategy, and religious belief among self-proclaimed Islamic states Saudi Arabia and Iran, Muslim democracies Indonesia and Turkey, Islamic political parties Hamas and Hizbullah, and transnational Muslim organizations al-Qaeda and the Tabligh Jamaat. Finally, I read Anne Rasmussen’s Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, learning not only about women’s roles in performing Indonesian exceptionalism and religious nationalism, but also delighting in the Islamic music and Qur’anic recitations that she both analyzes and gives examples of on the book’s website.

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Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Gender and Religion, Arizona State University

I spent several days in early June packing up my office for a move across campus, and how unexpectedly strange an experience that turned out to be, how oddly predictive of the plots I’d go on to download as fiction for the rest of the summer. The new space was more welcoming but smaller, with bigger windows and fewer shelves, so the task at the outset seemed to be to set aside the books I could do without. But soon it became to decide what I could possibly justify keeping: those yellowed paperbacks of Husserl and Kierkegaard, with my teenaged annotations (so true!!) in ballpoint? Decades of print journals? The doorstop-OED, complete with magnifying glass, that everyone I’d known in grad school had scored with a book club membership years earlier? Concordances, articles, definitive editions: everything that had not become interred in the era that produced it seemed now to be had by clicking. Then there was all the other paper: essays and exams that went unclaimed for years, lecture notes in longhand, drawers of manilla files. And the miscellaneous scraps I shook from the spines of old books: postcards, invitations, handwritten notes, souvenirs less of particular connections than of the ways that almost all of us have stopped communicating. Some universities now have a ponderous designation, “brick-and-mortar,” for classes that actually take place with real people in a  room, as though the whole face-to-face business had become irremediably airless and fraught. What couldn’t be found or done more easily, more deftly, online? A lot of us were moving out of the building at the same time, and the hallways became nearly impassable with high, haphazard stacks of all we were discarding. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. We got a little giddy with it.  We’d started the work, some of us, with headphones on, but soon were cranking up the dusty speakers we’d probably also leave behind.

The novels I finally fired up on my Kindle to read on vacation—Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,  Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia—were ripped straight from the best-of lists I’d scanned quickly while packing. It’s meant as description, not detraction, to say that each of these books somehow seemed to blur into the other three, in much the way that Egan’s loosely interlinked chapters come by the final pages to occupy the same, dazzling novel. A character in one book could plausibly go tripping into any other, blink a few times, and find himself in the same perilous mash-up, the shared predicament, to paraphrase Zadie Smith, of 1.0 humans trying to make sense of a 2.0 world. Even the soundtrack across three of the four is nearly the same: the music of the last five decades—its genius, its all-senses-of badness, and the often seamy business of selling it—belongs to these novels not only as background but as protagonist, anti-hero, and driver of plots, a token of resilience and a cautionary tale, a carrier throughout of the otherwise muted fear that what was happening to music post-Napster was what would happen to literature, was what had already happened to life.

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

Several recent essays have challenged me to think in new ways about the intersections between international human rights, religious freedom, and power and authority in world politics. One that stands out is Noah Salomon’s “The ruse of law: Legal equality and the problem of citizenship in a multi-religious Sudan” in the new volume After Secular Law, edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Robert Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo. Drawing on fieldwork in Sudan, Salomon challenges the working consensus among international non-governmental organizations and development agencies that “equality before the law” is a non-ideological solution to the problems faced by conflict-ridden and post-conflict societies. According to this consensus, if the law is procedurally sound it will serve as an apolitical, technical solution ontologically distinct from rule by force. Through detailed descriptions of his encounters with various groups in Sudan, including members of the government and allied Islamists (al-haraka al-islaamiyya, al-islaamiyuun), evangelist Salafis, and politically engaged Sufis, Salomon develops his argument that the “law, the institutions which promote it, and our relationship to them enfold deep ideological and political commitments which require a whole host of presumptions about justice and how best to achieve it.” Taking a cue from his discussions with the Salafis, he concludes with a question that is helpful in thinking about the politics of religious freedom and challenges of religious difference: “can we imagine a conversation about interreligious coexistence that does not rely on the liberal categories bequeathed by internationalist human rights discourse which we have seen, as in the case of ‘Umar al-Bashir’s speech, to be so inadequate?”

I recommend reading Salomon’s chapter together with other attempts to think critically about the global politics of human rights and the promotion of religious freedom, including Mathijs Pelkmans’ “The ‘Transparency’ of Christian Proselytizing in Kyrgyzstan”; Rosemary Hicks’ “Saving Darfur: Enacting Pluralism in Terms of Gender, Genocide, and Militarized Human Rights,” in Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen’s After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement; and Talal Asad’s forthcoming essay “Thinking about Religious Belief and Politics” in the Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, edited by Robert Orsi.

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David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

In witnessing the hardening of hearts and of lives in this staggeringly difficult economy, and in anticipation of an acrimonious election season, I was hungry this summer both for clarifying analyses of the economic ills that have befallen us and for tonics to the culture of cynicism that has come to characterize contemporary political culture in America. On the economy, I looked, as I often do, to Joseph Stiglitz and his searing book Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking World Economy and Paul Krugman’s columns in The New York Times. It was a tougher go to find alloys for the political climate. It was good to have Jeff Stout’s Blessed are the Organized, a sobering and hopeful account of the political possibilities of grassroots organizing in America. In a darker vein, while I wouldn’t say that the apocalyptic short stories set in 2024 in McSweeney’s Issue 32, especially Adam Doerr’s “Memory Wall”, were cause for hope (but hey, we’re talking apocalypse), they did help in recalibrating my mood.

More on the literary front: I am working up an essay on the great American epic playwright Tony Kushner. Kushner has enormously interesting things to say about religion, politics, and the arts. With these concerns and the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series I have been working on with TIF in mind, I was especially taken with the collection of interviews with Kushner Tony Kushner in Conversation. As my own thinking and research on religion, secularism, and the public sphere have increasingly moved to questions about memory, I have found myself reading what I would call “spiritual memoirs”—in particular, narratives of transformation and survival. Two of the best of the season were Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter and Patti Smith’s remarkable Just Kids.

I write these brief words on the day slated for the dedication of the memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr.—the 40^th anniversary of King’s “I have a dream” speech. That the dedication has been postponed due to the catastrophe named Hurricane Irene strikes me as tragically poignant for this American moment of dreams deferred. As much as I would wish it were otherwise, poverty, racism, and religious intolerance are very much still with us—a message spoken with moral clarity by Cornel West and Tavis Smiley. I suppose these conditions were the spurs that had me reaching again and again this summer for the prophetic words of James Baldwin, the master truth teller of an earlier toxic age, and the writings of Cornel, the leading figure of the American prophetic tradition of our time. Rereading The Fire Next Time, The Price of the Ticket, and other bracing essays found in the Library of America collection of Baldwin’s writings, as well as Prophesy Deliverance! and Democracy Matters were most welcome reminders about the power of the American prophetic tradition.

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Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine

Over the past month, I have found myself in the midst of daunting conversations (really debates, at times feeling more like attacks) with family members about religion and secularism, prompting me to return to Bill Connolly’s Why I am Not a Secularist as well as a rather disjointed but thoroughly enjoyable collection of other classics. The question at hand is to what degree secularism, like religion, is a social construction, and to what degree those who have never experienced anything they can call “religion” might reasonably be said to have been influenced by its systems of thought and practice. I have found in Connolly the intuitive understanding of the “visceral register” that I definitely relate to, as well as his description of both the stinginess of many religious models of thought and the constipation of quite a few secular ones.

The visceral register is something that, in my thinking about Christian, secular, Islamic, and traditional religious ethics and politics, constantly recurs. Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, which I have been perusing on and off for several months, exposes this monotheistic deity as navigating, like most of us, contradictory ethical impulses and worldviews, many of them quite visceral, to say the least.

Having grown up with an Irish Catholic consciousness, I continue to be fascinated by magical worlds and their relationships, potential or actual, to our received understandings of what is rational. Here on Martha’s Vineyard with my family (our vacation overlapping that of the very rational Obamas), I’ve taken up my sister-in-law’s copy of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which I’d never read cover-to-cover but am using in a co-edited book on humanitarianism in Africa, and was surprised to see the extent to which his revolutionary call for decolonization hinges on mobilizing the “supernatural, magical powers”  of “the natives” (he writes  on p. 56, “Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers”). Like Emmanuel Dongala’s amazing novel, Johnny Mad Dog, about a ruthless Central African boy rebel which I read earlier in the summer, these books highlight the intertwined power of amulets and guns, exorcism and liberation, deities and justice. They also, like Miles and Connolly, show how the intertwined power of secular and religious possibility can be used for very different political ends.

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John Lardas Modern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marhshall College

As summer ends I look forward to those books not gotten to. At the top of the pile: Gary Greenberg’s Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease, Pamela Klassen’s Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity, and the strange little essays collected in Cosmograms, edited by Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux.

In retrospect, however, this has been a good summer for reading around the edges—Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the tawdry but compelling Love Sex Fear Death: the Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment by Timothy Wyllie. David Foster Wallace’s A Pale King has become an addiction—page after page, word after tangential word that will transfix and transform (I’m serious about this) one’s orientation toward tedium:

They deplaned and descended and collected the carry-on bags that had been confiscated and tagged at Midway and now rested in a motley row on the wet tarmac beside the airplane, and stood then briefly en masse on a complexly painted cement expanse while someone with orange earmuffs and clipboard counted them and then crosschecked the count with a previous count undertaken at Midway.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention the albums in constant rotation this summer: a sonic history of Detroit on 3 LPs, The Dirtbombs’ Party Store (2011); Jesus-funk by way of Bermuda, Jimmy Mamou’s “I Am” He Said (1976); and finally, the All Saved Freak Band’s For Christians, Elves and Lovers (1976), an inspired example of the understudied genre of Tolkien-coloured evangelical psychedelica.

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Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

The ten year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks will no doubt elicit a wide range of retrospection and memorialization. I would like to use the occasion and this forum to suggest taking a look back at a novel from 2006, Jess Walter’s The Zero, a darkly comic meditation on the psycho-social aftermath of September 11. Despite a few favorable reviews and a National Book Award nomination, the novel failed to gain the attention it deserves on what has become a rapidly growing shelf of 9/11 novels. The Zero depicts the recovery effort and nascent homeland security initiatives through the eyes of Brian Remy, a police officer working at “The Zero,” the novel’s disaster-worker patois for the World Trade Center site, on the day of the attacks. After September 11 Remy sees “flashers and floaters” that dance in his field of vision, echoing the “scraps of paper blown into the world” from the towers, and suffers from a dissociative disorder: he consciously experiences only brief flashes of his own life, amnesic episodes rendered formally through narrative fragmentation.

Walter’s adherence to his formal conceit may feel clunky at times—sections break off and commence mid-sentence—but the novel’s agile plot and wry echoes of noir genre fiction more than make up for the rigid form. At the opening of the novel, readers encounter the protagonist as he awakens on September 12, 2001 nursing a head-wound that may or may not have resulted from a failed suicide attempt. In this and subsequent fragments, Remy must reconstruct with forensic evidence the plot of his own life as he plunges deeper and deeper into the paranoid labyrinth of intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism. Brian Remy is no Jason Bourne, fortunately, but the book reads with the tempo of a thriller, albeit one threaded with references to Camus, Kafka, and Robbe-Grillet.

For a satirist, the narratives about September 11 circulated by the government and media offer a rich bounty of targets, one largely untapped under a climate of self-censorship in the wake of the atrocities, and Walter’s savage humor makes the most of these opportunities. The novel also wrestles bravely with the American addiction to trauma, a task as pertinent in 2011 as it was in 2006.  In The Zero, trauma has become a new currency in a marketplace of disaster where a good story about the attacks “is like owning a good stock.” “Vicarious Trauma” becomes a billable line on an attorney’s invoice, and a caricatured psychoanalyst diagnoses Remy with PTSD, all evidence to the contrary be damned. The Zero leaves us with the unsettling implication that in the post-September 11 era we are all to an extent like Remy, our consciousness leaping like “smooth skipping stones,” as he philosophizes, “bounding across the surfaces of time.”

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

This summer I read about conservative philanthropists, religious colleges, and the spiritual left. Halfway through the summer, the three stacks started to talk to each other.

After devouring Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, I wanted to know more about Sunoco founder J. Howard Pew. A friend of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch (the inventor of the Junior Mint), Pew was an early advocate of libertarian economics. A conservative Presbyterian, he supported Christianity Today, Fuller Seminary, and Grove City College.

Ironies abound in the story of Spiritual Mobilization, a Pew-funded project briefly discussed in Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt. Founded to introduce Protestant clergy to the principles of free enterprise, it became an outpost for metaphysical religion and psychedelic drugs. In Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty provides the juicy details, noting the metaphysical influences on one of libertarianism’s most famous essays.

My summer reading got even weirder when the guru for Spiritual Mobilization showed up in two works that explore America’s “spiritual left,” Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Restless Souls and Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club. Part of the same social network as Timothy Leary and J. Howard Pew, mystic Gerald Heard lived “between the pigeonholes.”

Further muddying the waters, I read Founded by Friends: The Quaker Heritage of Fifteen American Colleges and Universities. Though I didn’t go looking for libertarians, they went looking for me. As fate would have it, the fifth president of Haverford College, Felix Morley wrote for Spiritual Mobilization. He also founded Human Events, once a home for anti-war conservatives. Quaker Henry Hazlitt was also a prominent libertarian.

All this suggests that we should be careful with our terminology. Sometimes the American right looks a lot like the spiritual left.

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Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Religion and Media, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

The summer’s headlines, from the debt ceiling debate to the Rick Perry juggernaut, confirmed the determination of a religiously tinged, fervidly conservative movement. My summer reading revealed the depth, breadth, and longevity of its campaign.

Popular narratives date the wedding of the political right with the religious right to the late 1970s, when Washington D.C. operatives began cultivating Southern evangelicals like Jerry Falwell. It’s an East Coast story driven by Beltway insiders who operate from the top-down. But Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart and Allan J. Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation complicate that picture. The authors describe networks of affinities based on conservative religion, anti-Communism, and free market economy that stretched from the Ozarks to Orange County. Looking back to the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, their books trace the crystallization of today’s conservative movement from its roots among itinerant Baptist preachers, suburban housewives, and newly minted entrepreneurs.

My late night and beach reading was similarly sobering. I’m a fan of dystopian young adult fiction because, I like to tell myself, it’s a window onto the spiritual imaginary of my daughter’s generation. This summer I tore through The Mortal Instruments, a four book series by Cassandra Clare that describes crushes, alliances, and familial dysfunction among demon-hunting humans, vampires, werewolves, and fairies. Unlike many young adult books I’ve read, the series directly addresses religion. A teenage Jewish vampire is burnt by a Star of David rather than a cross and star-crossed lovers debate a God who created soul-sucking monsters. Shaping and reflecting younger readers’ need for ritual, re-enchantment, purpose, and meaning, the books weave the same stories of righteous warfare, supernatural guardians, and the interplay of religion and secularism that mark American history. The difference is that histories describe what has been; fiction suggests what yet may be.

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This page was updated to include a contribution from Pamela Klassen—ed.

Below are their responses.

Our respondents are:

Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

Courtney Bender, Associate Professor of Religion, Columbia University

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religion, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State University

Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University

David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

Pamela Klassen, Associate Professor of Religion, University of Toronto

Patrick Lee Miller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Fellow of the Center for Social Research, Calvin College

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law, Director of the Law and Religion Program, SUNY-Buffalo

John Torpey, Professor of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York

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 Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University

A new semester gets underway this coming week, but at the moment I’m at the European Society for Philosophy of Religion’s conference in Oxford on “Religion in the Public Sphere,” savoring the last few days of a year’s sabbatical. My reading this past summer has included two excellent studies of nationalism—Anthony W. Marx’s Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford, 2005) and Craig Calhoun’s Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge, 2007). Though Marx’s book focuses on France, England, and Spain in the early modern period, it is hard not to think of contemporary America when he speaks of “the glue of religious exclusion as a basis for domestic national unity.” But if national identities are characteristically conceived too narrowly, Calhoun’s book argues that cosmopolitanism, liberalism’s proposed universalistic alternative, “does not provide the proximate solidarities on the basis of which better institutions and greater democracy can be built.” While the practical necessity of nations in the modern world is “not something in itself to be celebrated,” Calhoun points out that national identity is susceptible to contestation and reconfiguration. On his account, the ever present dangers of nationalism are better addressed by transforming, rather than by eliminating, the nation.

The book I’ve been reading on the plane is V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (Vintage, 1967). By coincidence, it is the third work of fiction I’ve read this summer featuring a protagonist, and by an author, in exile—the others being J.M. Coetzee’s Youth (Penguin, 2002) and Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (Vintage, 2008). Though I did not select these novels with the theme of national identity in mind, they seem, on reflection, to have something important to say about it. As Homi Bhabha has remarked, “wandering peoples [. . .] are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation.”

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Courtney Bender, Associate Professor of Religion, Columbia University

I’ve read mostly fiction this summer—guided by friends’ recommendations and by a hope that whatever good writing I read will rattle me out of the ruts of my thinking about scholarly matters. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Random House, 2004), Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (Riverhead Books, 1996), Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009) all provoked and rattled, and I can see ways that most could even be incorporated into courses. But all of those seemed a prelude to my finally starting Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) last week. Over the last two years, I’ve noted The Confidence-Man in numerous footnotes of recent books I’ve read on secularism. His/its presence in social scientific literature itself has prompted me to ponder the role of literature in social science more broadly. So it is only fair that I’ve finally picked up The Confidence-Man (which I am greatly enjoying!). I’m happy I have this complex and challenging novel to carry me into the fall.

In a different vein, the relentless discussion over the Ground Zero “mosque” compelled me to pick up and reread one of my very favorite books of all time, Rem Koolhaas’ 1978 polemic Delirious New York (Monacelli Press). One of the things that has interested me about the media circus is the relentless invocation of Ground Zero’s “sacredness” and what can only be understood as the quite different, competing views of sacred space pronounced by various sides. New Yorkers (myself included) have often found others’ views of lower Manhattan to be quite misguided, in part because (I think) New Yorkers live in a different kind of place. Koolhaas, a Dutch architect, helps me see how this difference works, and where it emerges, via architectural excavation and gorgeous writing. He says of Manhattan:

Not only are large parts of its surface occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the UN Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall), but in addition each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the New York that exists.

Koolhaas explains how congestion and complexity and chance intersect with commerce and utopian visions. The result is a city of monuments without a fully formed monumental mentality. Urban secularism and urban sacrality thrive in congested, irrational, utopian, mutated, and phantom “places.” In other words, he is invoking a similar story of complexities and complications in architecture and city planning that Melville demands that we engage in reading subjects’ interiors and surfaces. The possibilities and questions about living secularity that are unfurled in Delirious New York are truly fantastic and fantastical. It’s a great, great book.

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religion, Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State University

When I wasn’t busy rubbernecking at the flaming wreck of summer politics or enjoying the close proximity between the sound of vuvuzelas and Giacinto Scelsi (if you don’t believe me, listen to “Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra”), I tried to make time to read. But as I have sought refuge from the wreck in my research into jazz and American religions, and in those abidingly marvelous sounds, I found that two books on music enriched my thinking about religion and public life in surprising ways. Josh Kun’s Audiotopia (University of California, 2005) is a vibrant meditation on the utopic possibilities of musical performance and “almost-places of cultural encounter.” His attention to modes of sonic othering, however, pushed me to think more imaginatively about how American religious difference and identity, too, are sonic constructions where—in Kun’s formulation—the “heard” of difference flows beyond the interior to become amplified in public religious cultures.

Alex Ross’ magnificent The Rest Is Noise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) is not only a celebration of twentieth century “classical” music but a study in boundary-blurring. When listening carefully to poaching between genres—where composers from Ives to Stravinsky to Reich appropriate jazz, gamelan, and rebetiko, and where the Beatles cribbed from Stockhausen, Pink Floyd from AMM, Radiohead from Pärt—one realizes that genre boundaries were only ever there to be crossed with such frequency that, like those pluralist cultures so beloved in the academic imagination, origins and essences seem more fictive than real. What a fascinating comparison this makes for our shifting considerations of the category “religion,” whose distinction from not only the “secular” but from eros, economy, and so forth continues to preoccupy us. I love the idea that through sound we may escape from and return to these disciplinary rituals of questioning, and that the familiar could resound to us as a newly strange medley.

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Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University

I would love to tell you that my reading this summer has been wide and deep and scholarly, but the truth is that where my family and I retreat to in France the local wine is more reliable than the wireless, and the bookstore is a train ride away. I did manage to download all but the season finale of Treme before leaving home, and to find suitcase space between my kids’ picture books and preteen sagas for Mary Karr’s Lit (Harper Collins, 2009), Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons (Scribner, 2007), Paul Harding’s Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009), and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Knopf, 2006), all of which stood up to hard use. Back at the office, I’ve had the immense pleasure of reading John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America and Elizabeth Fenton’s Religious Liberties in manuscript: both are dazzling, and both are sure to shake up discussion about religion, secularism, and the public sphere when they appear in the coming year. I also had occasion to return to Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen’s visionary After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement (Columbia), due in October, and to Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia, 2009), which has justly been awarded this year’s AAR prize for the Best First Book in the History of Religions. Finally, I’ve started reading the essays now coming in for a volume Linell Cady and I are doing on religion, secularism, and gender in international contexts, including wonderfully rich contributions from Joan Wallach Scott and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. I’m often hard-pressed to find reasons to be hopeful about the direction of the academy, or about its contribution to a viable public discourse of religion. But there, that’s six.         

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David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

As I write this entry, the fifth anniversary of the cataclysm known as Hurricane Katrina is passing. In anticipation of this remembrance, I began the summer by reading Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun (McSweeney’s, 2009)—without a doubt the most powerful and affecting book of the season. To my mind, Eggers has become one of America’s most important writers, and in Zeitoun he provides an absorbing account of the dream and perverse nightmare of living and being a Muslim immigrant in the post-9/11 Bush-era. Another book that came to me through the catastrophic—this time the earthquake in Haiti—is Tracy Kidder’s biography Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2004). Both Zeitoun and Mountains Beyond Mountains tell inspiring stories of folks who act on the aspiration to do good in the world despite overwhelming conditions that indicate that doing otherwise is what makes sense.

Since embarking on the dialogue series Rites and Responsibilities, interviews and the like have increasingly drawn my attention. In this vein, I thoroughly enjoyed Terry Eagleton’s The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (Verso, 2009). Eagleton is not only a great cultural critic, he is also an engaging interlocutor in the debates around secularism.

There is always more, for sure. Shortly I will be turning to Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books, 2010) and Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects (Haymarket Books, 2010). I am very much looking forward to re-reading my dear friend Cornel West’s riveting memoir of a life well lived and well told Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (SmileyBooks, 2009), which will be coming out in paperback this fall. For me, among the most highly anticipated books of the coming season is Stanley Cavell’s autobiography Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, forthcoming). Cavell has long been an intellectual hero of mine—that rare philosophical alchemist who is able to conjure a consistent brew of art, wisdom, and insight.

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Pamela Klassen, Associate Professor of Religion, University of Toronto

A good deal of my spring/summer academic reading was determined by my reading list as a juror for two book prizes.  I was especially taken with two books that I read for the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religion Prize: the winner, Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2009) and one of the honorable mentions, Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (UNC, 2009).   Both books demonstrate how historical attention to specific communities of debate can complicate scholarly and popular assumptions about the lines between politics and religion—or even what counts as politics or religion to start with.

Kosek’s book tells the story of a “radical religious vanguard” of liberal Protestant pacifists in the United States between the two world wars.  A mix of theologians, clergy, and lay activists, the Fellowship of Reconciliation forwarded a sophisticated political and religious critique of state violence that was informed as much by their interpretation of Jesus as by Gandhian satyagraha.  Kosek’s attention to the uses of ritual in the movement, and the Fellowship’s influence on later versions of civil disobedience offers an important corrective to overly intellectualized portrayals of Protestant political dissent.

Tisa Wenger’s book also reveals the profound significance of ritual politics in the U.S., as she shows how various participants used, and even created, the category of “religious freedom” in the 1920s debate over Pueblo dances in New Mexico.   Especially fascinating is her account of how two alliances emerged, both invoking religious freedom: New York artists and anthropologists supported the Pueblo dancers as practitioners of an “authentic” religion under threat, while state education officials, many missionaries, and some Christian Pueblos themselves opposed the dances as “imposed” rituals that took children away from state-sanctioned schooling.

Both books are beautifully written and surprising interventions into the politics of religion, or the religion of politics, in American culture.

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Patrick Lee Miller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University

The only religion in my reading this summer was baseball:

Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, Josh Wilker (Seven Footer Press, 2010).

Proust had his madeleine; Wilker, his baseball cards. Meditating on one after the other, he summons, first his childhood in the 1970s, and then his adolescence in the 1980s. Whether it is the confusion of his hippie home in Vermont, the cruelty of the older brother who is also his idol, or his failure in school, work, and love—no matter how painful the memory, there’s a baseball card to make it vivid and comprehensible. Wilker is just as insightful when it comes to the history of the game that has become his therapy. Anyone who has ever collected baseball cards will marvel at the signs he reads in their awkward photos and peculiar statistics. In cards, as in therapy, as in life: there is infinity in a grain of sand.

Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Maraniss recounts the well-known facts of Roberto Clemente: his prodigious talent, his passionate and consistent play, the humanitarian effort that ended in his watery death. By setting them against the background of his Puerto Rican origins, though, Maraniss oscillates with Clemente each season between the adulation he experienced at home and the indignities he suffered on the mainland. Never so stoic as Jackie Robinson, Clemente burned for recognition. Loving the Pittsburgh fans who gave it to him, while hating the sportswriters who would not, he was proud to a fault. This pride pushed him to excel, in baseball and in life; to fight, in the batter’s box and in a crowd; to save, both earthquake victims and the ’71 Pirates. The Clemente of Maraniss shows that our virtues must also be our vices.

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

This summer I explored conservative Protestantism’s wrenching post-war transition from separatist fundamentalism to the “new evangelicalism.” Published in 1987, Rudolph Nelson’s The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell (Cambridge, 2002) recounts the painful effort of its subject to articulate a “post-fundamentalist” identity in the face of conservative attacks and liberal indifference. It begins with a discussion of Carnell’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills, including the details of the Alameda County coroner’s report. Just as heartbreaking is John D’Elia’s A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America (Oxford, 2008). Ladd was a key figure in moving evangelical theology away from the framework of dispensational pre-millennialism. Voted the most influential American biblical scholar by his fellow evangelicals, Ladd struggled to gain acceptance in the larger guild. Devastated by a negative review, he descended into alcoholism and depression. Read alongside each other, these parallel lives provide support for sociologist James Hunter’s observation that evangelicals have experienced a “double marginality” in the academy.

To see what they were up against, one only has to pick up William Vance Trollinger’s God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Wisconsin, 1991). Founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, Riley later promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Along the same lines, Riley’s ally Gerald Winrod argued that President Roosevelt was a Jew, spinning a conspiracy theory about the New Deal. Though most fundamentalist leaders eventually repudiated Riley and Winrod, it is chilling to read their sermons.

Lest these works tempt one to embrace a Whig interpretation of history, historian Paul Harvey notes that American society has a long way to go in the tolerance department. Currently, 18 percent of Americans (and 29 percent of white evangelicals) believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

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James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Fellow of the Center for Social Research, Calvin College

On the non-fiction front, I worked through a couple of books directly relevant to religion, secularism, and public life. I was finally able to read James Davison Hunter’s important new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford, 2010). This book is a game-changer, hopefully displacing the rather tired taxonomy of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (Harper & Row, 1956).

I was also able to read advanced proofs of Christian Smith’s new book, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago, 2010). This is something of a sequel and expansion of his methodological manifesto from a few years ago, Moral, Believing Animals (Oxford, 2003). Smith continues to contest reductionism of every stripe, and always has an eye on whether and how the social sciences can do justice to religious phenomena.

But summers are the time for me to indulge my taste for literature—though I probably never quite leave behind my interests in religion, secularity, and public life. Part of that includes my fascination with nineteenth-century “decadence” authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde, whose devotion to aestheticism looks remarkably religious, even monastic, at times. So I enjoyed re-reading Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884) and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) with those interests in mind.

I also finally read Jonathan Franzen’s “great American novel,” The Corrections (Picador, 2002), which, among many other dynamics, explores the tensions between a still religious Midwest and the secularized environs of the East coast. (This has put Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, at the top of my to-read list.)

If Franzen explores these tensions generationally—the elderly Midwest parents and the Eastern, secularized children—Martin Amis’ new novel, The Pregnant Widow (Knopf, 2010), explores this tension within a generation. Set in a bourgeois bohemian Italian castle in the summer of 1970, Amis considers the unique tensions of this postwar generation, conceived in one moral universe but birthed in one very different. The secularization of Europe is in the background throughout, though Amis’s Hitchens-like shots at religion are a bit sophomoric and tiring. His cynical wit makes up for it.

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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law, Director of the Law and Religion Program, SUNY-Buffalo

Two books which have significantly affected my thinking this summer are the recently published and much anticipated English translation of Bruno Latour’s La fabrique du droit (Paris, 2002) as The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’État (Polity, 2010) and Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard, 2010).

Latour’s “fly-on-the-wall” account of what lawyers do, based on extensive fieldwork at one of France’s three supreme courts, is remarkably successful at specifying exactly what it is to think like a lawyer. It is also often hilarious. Well, it’s hilarious if you are a lawyer. The Conseil d’État hears all final administrative appeals. It is made up of both civil servants and private individuals who cycle on and off the court. Latour shows in painstaking detail how the court, in cases reviewing the most mundane local decisions as well as those that threaten a constitutional crisis, shapes the facts on the ground into a legal question, one that is always strangely disassociated from the original facts. His is a powerful account of the ways in which “law” establishes itself; but also about the ways in which law is out of touch. Commenting on what you would know if you read the entire Lebon (the records of the court), Latour says:

You will have learned only law, occasionally punctuated by the more or less moving complaint of a few actors with colourful names. Wanting to transport knowledge via the routes of law would be like trying to fax a pizza. . . .

Donner’s reading of the earliest historical record of the people, ideas, and events, which later generations would shape into the beginnings of an Islam that would come to understand itself and be understood by others to be a bounded religious community, is a moving and lucid re-setting of the conversation. Donner’s scrupulous and respectful honesty about what is known about these events and his insistence that a premature reading back of later re-imaginings of those events by Muslims and others, has obscured them in significant ways, is breathtakingly refreshing.

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John Torpey, Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York

I recently had the good fortune to spend four months in Austria as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Graz, where my teaching responsibilities ran well into what we would normally regard as “the summer.”   Nonetheless, proximity to some of the major sites in the history of European Christianity, and distance from certain administrative obligations, afforded welcome opportunities to read around in areas relevant to The Immanent Frame.

I finally got a chance to read Peter Brown’s essential Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), and to be reminded that the center of gravity of Christianity was for a long time far in the east before it landed in Rome. Partially as a result of reading Brown, I traveled to Ravenna to visit some of the churches and mosaics dating from a period when that city was the western outpost of a newly Christianized Constantinople. Brown reminds us that for a long time, those in Constantine’s city thought of themselves as “Romans,” a fact reflected in the Turkish name for the “European” side of Istanbul (Rum).

I also took the occasion of my stay in Austria to read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial history of The Reformation (Viking, 2004). The book is extraordinary in both its sweep and its command of detail. I gained a new appreciation for the importance of Protestantism in its early years not just in the places where it ultimately triumphed and persisted, but in France (the Huguenots), Austria, and Poland (of all places!). We may think of these countries as more or less uniformly Catholic today, but they had serious episodes and bastions of Protestants in the years preceding the Counter-Reformation; these frequently involved efforts by territorial princes to stick a thumb in the eye of the Habsburgs. MacCulloch has now produced yet another doorstop, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2010). I may have to apply for another Fulbright to get through that one.

Finally, largely as a result of some wonderful and eye-opening travel in Spain, I sought to fill one of the persistent lacunae in my education by reading Don Quixote (1605, 1615). I now have a much better appreciation of what people mean when they describe someone’s endeavors as “quixotic.”

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The topic I want to pester Professor Keane about is belief. Christian Moderns uses the missionary encounter on the Indonesian island of Sumba to illuminate the contradictions inherent in the modernist project of “purification,” which separates out the materiality of words and objects from their symbolic meaning, and the social entanglements of human subjects from their transcendent souls. The book argues that both the roots and the contemporary manifestation of this battle against “hybrids” lies in a specifically Protestant tradition of religious reform. Conversations and confrontations between Dutch Calvinists and Sumbanese “pagans” and, more recently, Sumbanese Christians and followers of ancestral spirits throw into stark relief contrasting semiotic ideologies: “background assumptions about human subjects, words, and things.”  Caught up in a situation that forced them to explain themselves to—and distinguish themselves from—people that they considered radically other, the Dutch and Sumbanese men and women that populate the book speak eloquently of the varying assumptions that can guide people’s use, understanding, and valorization of the capacities of objects and words.

Where does belief fit in this picture? On the one hand, the book is all about belief: talk of belief is a key target of Professor Keane’s analysis. “From material presence to object of belief” is the title of one of the book’s subsections: the vector of “dematerialization” shifts the focus from practices to propositions, albeit propositions whose foregrounding requires practices such as the verbal performance of the creed. But belief is missing from the book’s toolkit of analytic terms. Professor Keane builds his argument using vocabulary drawn from contemporary linguistic anthropology.  His treatment of belief is akin to his treatment of fetishism: he keeps his distance. Take Professor Keane’s response to Susan Harding’s assertion: “Social scientists and professed unbelievers in general do not let themselves get close enough to ‘belief’ to understand it.” Keane writes:

We may take her point yet still recognize that as a blanket statement, this assertion depends on a specific idea of understanding, as well as a particular assumption about the place of belief in religion. The privilege it accords to subjective experience is something we should not accept uncritically. As Talal Asad and others have argued, the special role given to inner belief in many contemporary views of religion has specific historical sources and political entailments. It is perhaps worth noting, then, that Harding’s own remark comes in the context of her brilliant demonstration of the role that texts and ways of speaking that originate from other people play in constituting the inner experience of belief. The point is not to dismiss experience, but to recognize how it is situated and by what forms of mediation, and, when it is privileged, to ask why and to investigate the implications.

This is all very reasonable and well in accordance with mainstream views in today’s anthropology. Professor Keane seems to be respecting the no-fly zone that Talal Asad, Bruno Latour, and others have declared around questions of belief: like religion, the notion is the product of a dominant tradition in the West. Yet at the same time, as Professor Keane suggests when he adds the adjective “inner” to the noun “belief,” the book’s approach to belief is not so cut and dried. Belief pops up bereft of the scare quotes throughout Christian Moderns, often as a synonym for semiotic ideology, the analytic concept that is the linchpin of the book.

Here’s an example from Chapter 6, which at the same time provides a warrant for what I am trying to do by raising this question:

This is part of the puzzle for the well-intentioned interlocutor: If the agency of others is predicated in part on their own beliefs and on the notions of agency immanent in their practices, how are we, if, for example, we are secular scholars, to reconcile their attribution of agency to divine subjects with our desire that they recognize that agency lies within their own hands?

The “we” here is somewhat deceptive, for Professor Keane’s comments are more critical than reflexive. They conclude a chapter that offers a useful corrective to some anthropologists’ penchant for celebrating the agency of the oppressed. But what if we read this sentence straight and included Professor Keane within this “we?” What if we went further and pointed out that his own “agency” is also “predicated in part on [his] own beliefs and on the notions of agency immanent in [his] practices?” Professor Keane is skirting close to the no-fly zone here, and I would like to follow him in asking: is the agency of the anthropological analyst predicated in part on a belief in belief? Can we do anything without believing in belief—and its cousin, experience? Could asking these questions, while foregoing easy references to an inner/outer divide, enable us to deploy these terms in more expansive ways?

To give you a sense of where these questions might lead, let’s turn to one of Professor Keane’s most important sources of inspiration: Charles Sanders Peirce, whose account of the underdetermined materiality of the sign provides a foundation for many of the smart things Professor Keane has to say. Peirce did not, it seems to me, draw a sheer divide between “inner” and “outer”—thought is conduct, he wrote, undertaken in the company of others, even when we seem to be thinking alone.  Peirce defined the sign as an object that stands for another object to a mind, insisting that such objects both convey meaning and exist as material things that are subject to the workings of causality. Peirce did not shy away from speaking of belief: in fact, he insisted upon it, in criticizing those who spoke of metaphysical “truth” and “falsity.” For Peirce, “truth” would be “that to which belief would tend if it were to tend infinitely towards absolute fixity.”  Born of experience, or rather “experiment,” a collective operation involving the ongoing interpretation of signs, belief, for Peirce, is “not a momentary mode of consciousness; it is a habit of mind essentially enduring for some time, and mostly (at least) unconscious; and like other habits, it is (until it meets with some surprise that begins its dissolution) perfectly self-satisfied.”  For Peirce, it is not only what Professor Keane calls “semiotic form” that exists in the world; remember, for Peirce, thought is conduct. For a sign to operate as such, the relationship between two objects must be interpreted—by a mind—yet this interpretation does not exist in some “transcendent” or inaccessible “inner” sphere. This interpretation is itself a sign that elicits interpretation of its relationship to an object. When a closed window calls to mind a stuffy room, this interpretation impinges on the world when the thought causes someone to open the window and let in some air. For Peirce, belief is a habit, a habitual practice of the mind, that intervenes in history. Belief intervenes in the same way that Professor Keane describes semiotic ideologies as intervening in the Sumbanese history that he recounts.

Needless to say, the word belief, like all signs, is underdetermined, and its meaning depends on how it is used. “Believing in” may not be the same thing as “believing that.” Peirce’s discussion may not help us address the problem that Fenella Cannell finds in Christian Moderns, which, she observes, gives relatively short shrift to what the Dutch and Sumbanese thought and felt about God. Still, my guess would be that we could understand even more fully the appeal of practices like the recitation of creeds if we attended to the workings of belief as practice on a range of more or less explicit levels. This attention to belief as practice would force us to ask embarrassing questions, like, where, if not in experience, do semiotic ideologies live?

Moving beyond Christian Moderns, thinking about belief in this more generous, adventurous fashion might encourage those of us who share Professor Keane’s analytic sensibilities to consider the genealogy of our own semiotic ideology. Such a consideration would be in the spirit of Christian Moderns. As Professor Keane is no doubt aware, addressing the discourse of fetishism can trap a scholar in an infinite loop; in criticizing the critics one risks ascending to an Archimedean perspective of one’s own. When reading Christian Moderns for the first time, I kept thinking of Rachel Fulton’s magisterial book, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. Fulton shows how early medieval debates on the Eucharist reflected a desire not just for transcendence, but also for co-presence across historical time. In explicating the nature and origins of Christ’s presence in bread and wine, the era’s thinkers confronted conundrums inherent in a faith viewed as founded on the unrepeatable event of Christ’s death and resurrection. Problems of historicity—including the historicity of signs—were at the forefront of these thinkers’ minds, which themselves bore the marks of their times. The Saxon conversion and the failure of Christ to return at the millennium drove these thinkers towards new understandings of sign use. Eerily enough, they arrived at understandings that highlighted some of the features that Peirce and his followers have brought to the fore. It is kind of a joke when Peirce speaks of “Faith, Hope, and Charity” as the virtues required for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Then again, maybe it is not. I’m not sure what to make of these echoes; but it does seem worth pondering what it means when our tools can be used to reveal the historicity of our tools.

Thinking about belief in a more generous, adventurous fashion might also open up new opportunities for understanding non-religious practices. One example could be the practice of speech therapy, something that I’ve become acquainted with through my daughter, Millie. Millie is nine. She doesn’t talk. Neither does she sign, nor, for the most part, imitate the gestures of others. She connects with people, and she has a great sense of humor, yet she processes what she sees and hears in an utterly atypical way. She appears to be stalled on the threshold of sign use—at least sign use of a typical sort. Millie’s therapy has consisted of more or less successful attempts to push her over this threshold. Millie’s therapists surround her with talk and find messages in every sound or move she makes. There are all sorts of “assistive technology” systems available for kids like Millie. There are devices that allow you to record a message that a child can “say” by pushing a button. There are binders of taxonomically sorted utterances used for “partner assisted scanning,” a twenty-questions-like process in which therapists and caregivers pick out a behavior—a foot kick, a finger wave—that will “count” as a yes or a no. These methods, I’ve been told, are all premised on what is called the “doctrine of the least dangerous assumption.”  The least dangerous assumption is, in Millie’s case, that she will someday speak, by one means or another. The intentional speaking subject imprisoned in this freckled little girl will someday find release.

Anyone who has read Christian Moderns will recognize the semiotic ideology at work here. Millie’s therapy is premised on the assumption that “meaning” can somehow transcend “form.” But Millie’s therapy also foregrounds dimensions of sign use that receive short shrift in this ideology: the fact that others give us our words, the fact that reference is just a small part of sign use, the fact that we can only know what we “meant” after the fact. Millie’s work with her therapists vividly reveals the multifarious practices of belief entailed in our interactions with one another. It is not an accident that therapists speak of doctrine. If any pedagogy is faith-based, it is surely theirs.

But enough pestering. If I have stepped on Professor Keane again in this commentary, it wasn’t on purpose. I was merely trying to chart some of the unexpected places to which his wonderful book, Christian Moderns, might lead.

Reading through the book has therefore been a bracing reminder of this debt. There are many areas in which I can hope to do little more than re-stage some of his arguments with different materials.

The book performs several important interventions in the emergent discussion of globalization, Christianity, and secularism. Not all of these are polemically marked. For example, I take it as highly significant that although Webb’s analysis centers on the way a certain kind of subject is inculcated in colonial forms, he does not speak, as so many others do, of “the liberal subject.” In fact, although he argues for broad convergences of different evangelical imperatives—the purification of agency in distance from its objects being a kind of spinal emphasis running throughout the book—there is a broad allowance for the many ways this happens in different formal contexts, and a broad recognition that no singular subject needs to be (or could be) sutured around those imperatives, let alone identified with a putatively singular and presumptively secular liberalism. This is salutary.

So is the way he understands his material to cut across the religious/secular divide. He does not assume that the globalizing process of reconstructing religiosity emanates from a source internal to secular governmentality, as a heteronomous constraint. If anything, he seems to see the modular subject of modernity as produced by essentially Protestant means—a claim that, were he working on Europe or Latin America, would need a different kind of development in a way that is imaginable, though it is not the burden of his argument.

And finally, he makes a crucial intervention in focusing on the metapragmatics of forms of religiosity. What is taken to be the content of religion—belief, conversion, prayer—is heavily dependent on its ability to gloss and regiment the indexical dimensions of its discursive forms: creeds, preaching, praying. Commitments of personhood themselves are interpreted by Keane as part of a “semiotic ideology.”

Saba Mahmood also has extended this line of analysis to show that the semiotic ideology at the heart of modern Christianity is one of the central ways that modern secular governance tries to cultivate some forms of religiosity and not others.

In my own research, a few additional dimensions of the evangelical semiotic ideology have become central to the way I understand the process. Let me touch on these briefly. I do not think these represent disagreements with Keane’s approach; rather, they seem to me to be extensions of it, and indeed there are passages in the book that express related observations.

The first is that evangelical discourse has a peculiar relation to space. Practices of discourse—speaking, praying, theorizing, preaching, reading, singing, and so on—work in different ways to organize the space through which discourse moves. So, at one extreme, the London Puritan Edward Dering once defined the Church itself as “a company called together by the voice of a preacher”; all ecclesiology could be reduced to the situation of address established by preaching, which meant that sermon audition was a ritual practice with a significance far from accounted for by the content of sermons.

Evangelicalism is not possible, in either the colony or the metropole, without the socially expansive address of conversionist preaching—my relation to you being partly a matter of how this speech between us might effect your conversion. (The relation between that expansive project and colonial geographies is something I wish Webb would address further.) Conversionist projects—preaching, witnessing, tract distribution, broadcasting, etc.—require and produce a complex set of forms, including both an understanding of the social field of the unconverted, through which conversionist discourse moves (expansively, as across smooth space), and a conception of the addressee as capable of effecting belief of a particularly saving kind. (Hence the irony that evangelical forms that emerged within Calvinist culture led to the upending of Calvinist theology.) God himself came to be reconceived, according to the structural demands of this form of preaching, as a rhetorical god addressing himself to potential converts with impressive incentives for a newly agentialized belief in his existence.

This is illustrated in Webb’s treatment of the discourse of the house. It can be reproduced anywhere, anytime, by anyone, and thus seems to have lost its link to a specific ordering of space and a specific category of speaker. But this is to some degree illusory. Producing the emptiness of the space through which it moves is a major burden of the form.

Or take the form of the creed, on which Keane dilates with such brilliant effect. He is right, I think, to emphasize that giving the creed a textual form makes it “highly portable across contexts,” and that “the circulation of modular forms such as creeds works against the localizing forces on which anthropologists of global religions have tended to focus.” I think he is also quite right to emphasize some unrecognized paradoxes in the rhetoric of belief that a creed articulates. But even while creedal circulation works against some localizing forces, it also creates a new spatialization of its own.

It is not quite true that creeds are unique to modern evangelical movements. Recitations of creeds have been part of national church projects such as Catholicism, at least for much of its history, or the Church of England before Toleration. They functioned as tests of orthodoxy. They supposedly saturated the space of possible belonging. Liturgical recitation of the creed in such a context (and the Apostles’ Creed, which Keane quotes, remains in the Anglican liturgy) foregrounds the reflexive I who believes—only, paradoxically, in order to make audible in public acoustic space and visible in common witnessing the absolutely non-individual (and non-optional) dimensions of affirmation. Credo-ing, if I may so call the practice, produces affirmation as common effort and as anchor.

Even here, a whole set of separations is put in place. We believe these doctrines; others believe something else (presumably elsewhere, or voicelessly excluded, or compulsively named as unthinkable), or it would make no sense to affirm.

Keane rightly observes that reform movements made the creed more private and exacted a different kind of agential commitment in its utterance. (They also made them the object of broad print circulation and comparison.) The semiotics of the credo is subtly but powerfully transformed in the denominationalist imaginary that is the presupposition and entailment of evangelicalism. We who believe are now among the others who believe otherwise; those who do not believe are the necessary environment of our solicitation; my credo-ing allies me (voluntarily, witnessably) with strangers who in a modularly predictable way believe the same, cognitively identical, content. It also marks me off from others who happen to be proximate to me without making the same affirmation.

Thus the space in which the creed is uttered is a space of aggregation; potentially innumerable others might repeat the act because one does so in a default environment supposedly not defined by the creed itself. The effects of spatialization and common witnessing have become only implicit, in order to foreground the enunciating agent. But they are still there.

Second, ethical agency. One of the most powerful parts of Keane’s analysis is his emphasis on the way evangelical discourse requires a recursion in which the subject takes an agential stance on his own beliefs. There is a basic structure here, which is shared between evangelical religion (or religion in general when fashioned in the evangelical semiotic ideology) and the secular practices of critical agency. Subjectivity is purified in its distance from text objects. In secular contexts the resulting subject often disappears into discursive forms that do not appear to be addressing or emanating from individuals at all—science being the most obvious example. But they presuppose for this very reason an effortful labor of ongoing self-relation.

Here we come to my question. It isn’t clear to me that purification—the attempt to make clear separations between agents and objects—fully describes the process. “This purification process, undertaken in the name of religious reform and of modernity, became a paradigm well beyond Western or Christian societies.” For one thing, the forms of evangelical modernity create their own hybrids, as Keane acknowledges two paragraphs later. These include not just Pentecostalist modes of experience, faith healing, magical prayer, and so on, but also those modes of mystery that are produced by the same mass-cultural forms: supernatural fiction, astrology, UFOs, Jesus in tortillas. Granted, many of these make the religious reformers highly uneasy. And it is crucial that the modern order put into place largely by evangelical means does not recognize these as legitimate forms of religiosity. But whatever is modern about the purification impulse is also accompanied by equally modern hybrids. And thus I wonder whether purification, powerful though it might be, gives us the core logic of the modern.

After all, in evangelical conversion an agential stance toward one’s beliefs very often produces not a purification of agent/object relations, but new hybrid spiritual agencies, beginning with the global transformation of personality (emotions, appetites, instincts) that is supposed to be the experience and evidence of conversion itself.

Thus the pattern that seems to me most compelling in the materials is not the purification of agency but the creation of modular, extractable, translatable forms—both of texts and persons—whether those consist in purified agency or not. I can read Keane’s book primarily as a study of the productive dimension of disembedding and its colonial effects.

As such, Christian Moderns is part of an expanding, interdisciplinary discourse about liberalism, modernism and secularism.  Within anthropology, the key figure in this discourse is, of course, Talal Asad, who figures centrally in Keane’s account. Within philosophy, one naturally thinks of Charles Taylor, who is also frequently cited. But one thinks, too, of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean Elshtain.  Turning to theology, Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank come to mind.

Christian Moderns nonetheless stands apart in at least two respects: in method and in conceptualization.  Whereas the foregoing works mainly employ a historical and critical approach that contrasts the modern West with its premodern self and its heterodox variants, Keane works mainly comparatively, using the Indonesian mission encounter to unearth the doxa of modern Euro-American culture.  Further, whereas Asad relies mainly on the genealogical strategies of Foucault and Nietzsche, Keane adds Latour’s theory of “purification” and “hybridity.”  In reading the semiotic ideology of the Sumbanese as a form of fetishism, which attributes agency to words and things, Keane argues, the Dutch Calvinist missionaries are compelled to articulate their own semiotic ideology, which views authentic moral agency as arising out of a self-conscious disentanglement of an immaterial and interior self from all forms of the material and the external.  But this process of purification is necessarily incomplete. Humans, after all, are social and physical creatures. Thus,  processes of purification inevitably give rise to new forms of hybridity—in this case, to new texts, rituals, incantations and so on, either directly, in the form of routinized religious practices or, indirectly, in the form of heterodox religious movements, such as Pentecostalism.

On all these counts, Keane’s account of purification is remarkably consistent with those set forth by the philosophers and theologians.  With Taylor’s accounts of excarnation and the buffered self; with Elshtain’s account of autonomization and sovereignty; with MacIntyre’s ferocious attack on the putative invulnerability of the liberal self, and so on.  On two other counts, however, it goes beyond and even challenges them. First, by highlighting the role of colonial encounters in the purification process.  And second, by emphasizing the role of missionary work, not simply in spreading Western religion, but, paradoxically, in diffusing Western secularism as well.  As such, Keane’s account subtly pushes back against theories of “multiple modernities,” which tend to portray “world civilizations” as bounded entities evolving independently in accord with  their own “cultural logics.”

That said, Keane’s comparative approach does have the inevitable weaknesses and blind-spots, and these emerge clearly in the contrast with the more historical and critical works of Taylor and company.  By tracing out the historical genesis of modern conceptions of moral agency, Taylor and company are able to isolate multiple turning points in the genesis of modern secularism including:  Ockhamist nominalism, the neo-Epicurean transvaluation of natural law theory by Grotius, Hobbes and Hume, the disenchantment of the cosmos via providential deism, the sacralization of the state in Rousseauian republicianism and its Jacobin offshoots,  the aestheticization of the self in late Romanticism and so on.  Keane is of course well aware of this weakness and of the incompleteness of his account.  But he seems less aware of the crucial blind-spot: the existence and persistence of competing semiotic ideologies and rival visions of moral agency within the Euro-American tradition.  For MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Elshtain, Milbank and Taylor critique modern liberal secularism not from without, but from within, by drawing variously on Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.  Amongst many other things, they argue that moral agency is necessarily embodied via the cultivation of virtue; that tradition is not the opposite of rationality; and that worldly sovereignty must not be monopolized by the secular state.  In other words, they dispute the central tropes of modern, liberal secularism.  Keane, by contrast, eschews critique of this sort, preferring instead to raise the semiotic ideology of Euro-American culture to greater self-consciousness. To that degree, however, he remains a captive to the very ideology he wishes to critique, since increased self-consciousness as an end in itself is, after all, one of the governing tropes of moral agency in the West.  Does this mean that prophetic critique is the only possible form that a critique of secularism can take? That one must be a theist to be a critic in our secular age?  By no means.  Political philosophers such as Quentin Skinner, Phillip Pettit and Michael Sandel, amongst others, have elaborated a powerful neo-republican critique of modern liberalism.  William Connolly, meanwhile, has used Nietzsche and James to develop a theory of “deep pluralism” that is neither secularist nor theist.  Even Jürgen Habermas, that icon of Euro-American enlightenment, has recently urged his partisans to recognize the untapped “semantic potentials” and “moral resources” still contained within religious languages and communities.  In his call for a post-secularist philosophy, Habermas seems to be heralding the emergence of new hybridities. If so, perhaps the latest wave of purification has crested.

For the context of The Immanent Frame, I’d like to draw out two themes in Christian Moderns: the moral narrative of modernity and the problem of agency in its relation to materiality. Both of these enter into the largely implicit portrayal of secularism that runs through the book. 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.

This moralization of history—a largely tacit set of expectations about what a modern, progressive person, subject, and citizen, should be—has become so woven into liberal common sense that it can be hard to discern. In order to make the taken-for-granted more visible, the book focuses on the especially sharp contrasts found in the encounter between Dutch Calvinists and ancestral ritualists on the Indonesian island of Sumba. But the core argument is that, for all the particularity of this historical and ethnographic context, it sheds light on matters of wider concern. Listening to participants from across the spectrum in this encounter, I argue that they both reveal and challenge commonplace assumptions about materiality and freedom that run through both mainstream Protestantism and secularism in the Euro-American North.

My treatment of modernity merits some clarification here. I do not try to define modernity as an objective aspect of a period of history, but rather as a feature of people’s historical consciousness. That is, regardless of the practicability of the many and contradictory definitions of modernity currently on offer, we can probably at least agree on this: people around the world think there is such a thing as modernity. They are asking things like: Are we there yet? How do we get there? What will it cost us? How can we get out of it? Why are others not as modern as we are? Are they going to drag us back? And when people ask these questions, they are usually not taking modernity as a neutral description of the world, surveyed from afar and with indifference. This normative, and often desire-saturated, view of history, is one key to its religious sources. In the moral narrative of modernity, progress is not only a matter of technological mastery, economic organization, scientific knowledge, environmental disaster, or certain forms of governance. It is a story about human emancipation and self-mastery. If, in the past, humans were in thrall to illegitimate rulers, rigid traditions, and unreal fetishes, as they become modern they realize the true character of human agency. According to this moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermine freedom. Conversely, those people who seem to persist in displacing their own agency onto such rules, traditions, or fetishes (including sacred texts) are out of step with the times. They are morally and politically troubling anachronisms, pre-moderns or anti-moderns.

What makes this a specifically Protestant story is that the narrative tends to link moral progress to practices of detachment from and reevaluation of materiality (thus the Calvinists of Sumba, like Protestants in many mission fields, often see the apparent materiality of Catholic practice—everything from verbal formulae to icons—as evidence that their rivals are thinly veiled pagans). Materiality and dematerialization are, of course, recurrent issues in religious reform movements across the historical record. But these were often restricted to the domain of intellectual elites or religious virtuosi. Protestantism played a major role in building the project of reconfiguring materiality into the everyday practices of ordinary people; thus it entered into mainstream sensibilities in the Euro-American West and their mission fields. The religious attack on semiotic form converges with other ideas, such as Enlightenment thought about morality, autonomy, and freedom, which became central to later secular institutions and habits.

A great deal of contemporary academic and political work tends to presuppose the moral narrative of modernity. Arguments about agency, rationality, or freedom, for instance, are often tacitly informed by the assumption that self-transformation is not only a central aspect of historical progress, but also a good that exceeds local systems of value. Those people who reject the claims of modern agency—those non-moderns who defer to (excessively material) gods, scriptures, or traditions, for example—are subject to accusations of “fetishism.” To accuse people of fetishism is to indict them for misunderstanding their own capacities. When people impute agency to entities that the outsider does not recognize, such as an interventionist God or a concretely efficacious ritual, they are not only mistaken. They are morally and politically troubling, even threatening. The moral narrative of modernity characteristically demands that they recognize their own agency. But this demand, at least as it has been formulated within the liberal tradition, may be impossible to reconcile with another demand of the same tradition, that we accord others their due recognition.

The encompassing story within which I situate Christian Moderns is thus a long history of Euro-American efforts to escape some of the implications of the ways human subjects are embedded in social and material worlds. These efforts, which have important religious sources but extend beyond explicitly religious domains, often focus on semiotic form as a source or symptom of moral trouble. Much of the substance of the book is meant to show how problems of agency, language, and objectification are apparent in the concrete details of practical activities. Attempts to sort out proper relations among, and boundaries between, words, things, and subjects are often driven by the question “what beings have agency?” But these problems are not merely theoretical, and not only the special concern of elite thinkers and makers of grand narratives. In many respects, attention to details in the treatment of money, changes in speech pragmatics, disciplines of sincerity, different ways of objectifying the house, or the handling of meat during feasts reveal more about how large conceptual problems enter into everyday life than do theoretical texts or utopian models. It is through such concrete activities both that ontological and moral systems become inhabitable and that their impossibilities become apparent.

With the dog-days of August already at hand and the fall semester just around the corner, we’ve been curious about what our contributors have read these past few months. So we asked: What are the best books and essays you’ve come across this summer? What are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?

We have posted responses throughout the week. You can find previous responses here and here.

Today’s panelists are:

Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

Rudy Busto, Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State University

Webb Keane, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Omar M. McRoberts, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

Stathis Gourgouris, Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

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Nancy Levene, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

Summer reading! Badiou on the beach, sand in one’s Santner, parasols and paradoxes and political theologies—well, why not? I spent the summer on the road, not the beach, conscious that the imperatives of public life in microcosm are more elocutionary than literary. Still, I read, or re-sampled, two books that cry out for conversation, one way of imagining the anonymous “who” of recommendation. The first is Alain Badiou’s Polemics, which collects and translates essays on the topics of war (Iraq, Serbia), democracy and religion in France (e.g., headscarves), radical politics, and most compellingly, Badiou’s reflections on “the uses of the word ‘Jew.’” Badiou advances the claim that the use of the nomination ‘Jew’ to signify a community “of blood and soil, of race, of custom” is a betrayal of the word Jew, whose import is a universal one. Does this speak liberation theology or anti-Semite? Religious or secular manna? Does the very conjunction “blood, soil, race, custom” make him critical critic or owner of the means of obfuscation? Do his ends—universals—make sense in light of his analysis of history? The second is Foucault’s The Order of Things—right, not recent, not about secularism or religion or public life per se. But, not unlike the topical/philosophical Polemics, a book that tries to get inside—and outside—the mind of our categories, to traffic in thresholds and not simply meanings. I have been interested in this book’s own mind, its pervasiveness in the way we think about the transience of the public, the replacement of a zeitgeist, the identification of a past and a future, of an “our day” and a “theirs.” It is “soil,” not sand, that is “once more stirring” under our summer feet, Foucault suggests, and I wonder how seriously we do and have taken this prophecy.

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James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

Summer is an opportunity to turn my reading habits away from professional obligations, though perhaps one never stops reading with those eyes. The highlight of my summer reading was finally poring through Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (Scribner’s, 1929), a roller-coaster roman à clef which can be profitably read, I think, as an Augustinian parable. In contrast to the Presbyterian echoes of Wolfe’s North Carolina, Philip Roth’s first “Zuckerman” novel, Ghost Writer (FSG, 1979) raised issues about faith, criticism, and identity in quite a different place: post-Holocaust, American Judaism (with Isaac Babel hanging over the story).

On the poetry front, I enjoyed revisiting some favorites now included in Charles Wright’s latest collection, Sestets (FSG, 2009). While Wright’s poetry is persistently interested in debunking humanity’s significance, on the other hand there’s a certain enchantment to Wright’s “nature.” So in this respect, I think Wright is an interesting poet who challenges our habitual conceptions of “the secular.” I also read Carl Sandburg’s Selected Poems in the little collection edited by Paul Berman (LOA, 2006), and have been dipping into Raymond Carver’s All of Us: The Collected Poems (Vintage, 1996), despite being thoroughly annoyed by Tess Gallagher’s self-indulgent introduction.

For the fall, it’s back to the real world. I’m looking forward to a close reading of Eric Gregory’s important book, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago, 2008) in preparation for a panel at the American Academy of Religion in November. I’ll be doing the same with Graham Ward’s brash new volume, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Baker Academic, 2009). And I’m leading a faculty reading group of J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, 2008), which I anticipate will be provocative, maddening, and inspiring.

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Rudy Busto, Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Adam Roberts’s History of Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2007) provides a fascinating and important alternate history of the “west” through the dynamic struggle between the materialist/rationalist and imaginative/spiritual impulses. Science Fiction will be one of the next critical idioms in the study of religion, and Roberts has a clear beat on it. Roberto Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesus: Towards a Theology of Accompaniment (Orbis, 1995): a challenge to Anglo/North Atlantic modes of theology focusing on the lives of everyday Mexican Americans in San Antonio. One of the touchstones for the writing of contemporary Latinate theologies. Carol B. Duncan’s This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (Wilfred Laurier, 2008) is fresh reading of Black religion in Canada, applying solid social science research with a careful ear to what believers in this Caribbean religious tradition say about their faith and place in “multicultural” Canada.

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Jason Bivins, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State University

Here in North Carolina, our Fall semester has already begun. As I get reacquainted with the classroom and with my colleagues, I look back contentedly on a relaxing summer of reading and—what’s almost of greater interest to me these days—re-reading. Though I told myself I would look away from the spaces of doom-shouting that have preoccupied me in recent years, I’d be lying if I failed to admit that I spent a vast amount of time this summer watching and listening to (and reading about) the acrimonious health care “debates,” and their related spectacles and fearful imaginings.

More productive (and less stressful) was my reengagement with two consistently stimulating texts: Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption and Ronald Radano’s Lying Up a Nation. As my current research turns to music, performance, and rituals of resistance in American jazz traditions, these books—both investigating mutable traditions of American self-imagination in expressive cultures—help me think through the relation between the American habits of self-understanding (always at the intersection of self-creation and constraints narrative and cultural) and the interpretive traditions that have paralleled, facilitated, obstructed these attempts.

Fessenden’s study of the mutual imbrication of Christianities and secularisms in American literature documents the challenges of dissent from the basic grammars of American self-understanding. Where Fessenden focuses on the narrative construction of particular Americas, particular publics, and particular secularisms, Radano’s book teases out the construction of particular modes of citizenship and cultural belonging through historic delineations and circumscriptions of black musical expression. He describes the “lie” often accruing to black music, a focus on “soul,” “depth of feeling,” or “religious energy” that has been used to characterize forms ranging from field shouts to early “jass” to R & B and beyond. By situating the efforts of mostly white interpreters to “fix” and frame such music, Radano shows how these interpretations—built on enduring preconceptions about religion and performance in public life—have strengthened prevailing racial logics as well as expectations about the taming of “enthusiasms” in public life. I’ve found it really enriching to put these texts in conversation, thinking through the meanings made of “religion” in American expressive cultures, its definitions and accepted contours made and remade in those multiple spaces where freedom and constraint name one another.

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Webb Keane, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I have just finished reading Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (forthcoming this fall from Yale University Press), which derives from her 2006 Terry Lectures. It takes on some of the most visible protagonists in the science versus religion quarrel, focusing, on the one hand, on attempts to use evolutionary psychology to “explain religion,” and, on the other, efforts within what she dubs “The New Natural Theology” to encompass or rationalize Darwinian science. It’s an unequal battle, and she devotes more of her attention to the former, whom she takes to pose a more challenging set of claims, and to be working with what appears, even to a critic, to be a more coherent model. The book is useful for a number of reasons. Perhaps foremost, for followers of the Immanent Frame, it provides a generous, thoughtful, and clear summation of the major arguments and their rebuttals. Although Smith’s own position is never in question, she makes an admirable effort to be even-handed and to learn what is useful from those she criticizes. Secularism as such is not precisely her topic, but the way she frames the argument is of direct relevance to how the case for secularism—as an epistemological ethic, if not a political mandate—has often been made. She draws on both Two Cultures sociology and the psychology of cognitive dissonance to show parallels in the nature of the arguments on each side, but wisely resists any temptation to put these parallels to the service of tendentious apologetics or tu quoque (in the vernacular, “Your mother too!”) dismissals. Rather, she brings them out in order to make a case for reflexivity and against methodological purism and explanatory triumphalism.

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Omar M. McRoberts, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

The Civic Life of American Religion. Edited by Paul Lichterman & Brady Potts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. Barbara Dianne Savage. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008.

Garveyism as a Religious Movement. Randall K. Burkett. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1978.

God and the Welfare State. Lew Daly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

W.E.B. DuBois, American Prophet. Edward J. Blum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsilvania Press, 2007.

Politics as Religion. Emilio Gentile. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Justin Neuman, Assistant Professor of English, Yale University

My vote for the most engaging book on the subject of religion and secularism published in so far in 2009 is Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Written for public recitation in the Dwight H. Terry Lecture series at Yale University, which invites scholars to reflect on science, religion, and human welfare, Eagleton’s book surges with energy and wit. Part invective against the evangelical atheisms of writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, Eagleton takes contemporary atheists to task for the shoddy state of their theological understanding, focusing primarily on the reduction whereby critics of religion view a complex life-world primarily as an outdated form of science. To see religion as “a botched attempt to explain the world,” he writes, “is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus” (50). While fighting inadequate secularization theory with one hand, Eagleton fashions a curiously compelling picture of Christian faith with the other. Wrapping his theological musings in a modest package (he calls his account of Christianity “thoroughly orthodox, scriptural, and traditional”), Eagleton reclaims Christianity from the Christian right. In a set of inversions Žižek would admire, Eagleton shatters any complacency in Christianity: “If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do” (27). God is not omniscient creator but pointless aesthete, an artist who made the world “for the hell of it” (8). More importantly, Eagleton is drawn to the radical and socially progressive impulses of a Christianity that finds “the only authentic image of [its] violently loving God…[in] a tortured and executed political criminal, who dies in an act of solidarity with…the destitute and dispossessed” (23). Compulsively readable and politically timely, Eagleton’s book cuts the religion/secularism binary with the sharp edge of humor.

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Stathis Gourgouris, Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

The summit in summer reading for me is reading Greek newspapers, two per day, four on Sundays. I don’t know why I do this—I can hardly get through the NY Times with any sort of regularity. But these maculate figures of daily news are, in innumerable ways, the epitome of secular pleasure. Even when they bear ill tidings, or convey profoundly depressing facets of human behavior, they are nonetheless replete with that wondrous sense of the ephemeral, the incidental, the outrageous, the mundane. I’m a lover of the leisure of literature and there is surely plenty of that in reading Greek newspapers in the shadow of a fig tree during a hot afternoon after lunch and before siesta.

Sunset time, between the evening swim and a drink at the bar on the beach, invites the sort of reading whose pleasure lies in uncovering the various dead-ends in one’s thought. Such was the experience of reading Cornelius Castoriadis’ Fenêtre sur le Chaos (2007), a collection of writings on humanity’s artistic capacity, especially in poetry and music, which includes a couple of brilliant interviews and a long and previously unpublished section of one of his notorious seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. This book brims with Castoriadis’ inimitable panache for straight-shooting at whatever feigns mysteriosity, and it includes some memorable pages on the abyssal physis that instigates the imaginary of the sacred.

Another such book was Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s classic Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1972), a work that launched so-called new biology studies. What’s remarkable about this book is not only that it conceptualizes how an organism is, at an elemental level, the force of self-creation, but that this force itself—as living being—is an epistemological condition. Even more, the brilliant writing brings out the exhilaration of encountering a truly literary sensibility.

Aspirations of future reading are best not to be communicated, I’m afraid. Their realization falls far short of one’s expressed appetite.

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Read previous responses here and here.

With the dog-days of August already at hand and the fall semester just around the corner, we’ve been curious about what our contributors have read these past few months. So we asked: What are the best books and essays you’ve come across this summer? What are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?

Responses will be posted throughout the week. You can find previous responses here.

Today’s panelists are:

Omri Elisha, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Queens College, City University of New York

David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

Tomoko Masuzawa, Professor of History and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

Patrick Lee Miller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University

John Lardas Modern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College

John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

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Omri Elisha, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Queens College, City University of New York

My summer reading involved a rare privilege for me: the reading of popular fiction. On advice from a friend, I read Flannery O’Connor’s satirical novel, Wise Blood (1952), the story of Hazel Motes, a disgruntled war veteran and self-anointed preacher of blasphemy. In a desperate and lonely act of iconoclasm, Hazel founds “the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified” (shorthanded as the Church Without Christ). He soon finds himself unwittingly and tragically entangled in the lives of would-be followers, detractors, and rivals, as he struggles with the consequences of a charismatic breakthrough (in the Weberian sense), devoid of coherent purpose or content. This Southern Gothic novel is both hilariously funny and stark; both sympathetic and brutal in its representation of human impulses and cultural sensibilities associated with sin, redemption, ambition, violence, and desire. While hardly an overt sociological meditation on secularism or religion and public life, Wise Blood offers entertaining insights into the intersections of personal and public religiosity, the performativity of the prophetic (and by extension, questions of religious “authenticity”), and the dialectical interactions of orthodoxy and heresy in the realm of everyday social discourse.

And speaking of heresy, I recently viewed Luis Bunuel’s 1969 film Milky Way (1969), a very funny surrealist journey through various heretical and counter-heretical traditions in the Catholic Church. The film is possibly too esoteric for classroom use, but it is a real treat for fellow nerds who might appreciate a cynical yet light-hearted comedy full of theological references.

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David Kyuman Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Connecticut College; SSRC Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame

I’m always on the lookout for books that inhabit that rich “gray” area between the religious and the political. In this spirit, I very much admired George Shulman’s American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Politics. I have a long-standing interest in the prophetic and the notion of vocation. Shulman’s book prompted me to revisit some “old” texts like Abraham Joshua Heschel’s foundational work, The Prophets, and to look at some new ones like Michael Wood’s elegant and incisive The Road to Delphi. I’ve been doing some work on American exceptionalism of late, and that has sent me back to revisit important classics like Robert Bellah’s The Broken Covenant and David Noble’s Death of a Nation. In a different, though related, vein, I found the new book by Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, to mark a wonderful and much needed advance beyond the pat discourses about the secular and engagements of religion and politics. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Saba Mahmood’s fiercely smart analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” in Critical Inquiry.

My stack of “books to read” is imposing and serves as a curious source of pleasure, guilt, and anticipation. Among the many books calling for my attention, I have in there Gary Dorrien’s Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate and his Jesus Christ: the Gospels, Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, and David Harvey’s Wellek Lectures entitled “Cosmopolitanism and Geographies of Freedom.” Alas, summer—the season of good intentions—is now over and it’s time to make good on the promise to myself to get to these important books!

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Tomoko Masuzawa, Professor of History and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

“Summer reading” for me has never been as pleasurably idyllic as it probably ought to be. I could attribute this to the deficit in my proficiency in English. This being a foreign tongue, I could never read fast enough, and ever since graduate school, much of my summer has been spent covering what I couldn’t during the preceding nine months. Nowadays my English is better but the number of quotidian tasks throughout the academic year is far greater; therefore, I still experience a welcome sense of respite in the summer. During this past year I attended half a dozen events that had “secular” or “postsecular” in the title; having kept pace with those up-to-the-minute discussions, it is nourishing and rejuvenating to return to the library for the summer, to go fishing in deep historical waters.

My catch of the season may not be exotic but it is a fine specimen of a classical genre, a book first published in 1878 entitled Church and State: A Historical Handbook, by a Scottish jurist, A. Taylor Innes (2nd ed. 1890). Not a tantalizing title, to be sure, but it should be remembered that the author belonged to a milieu whose manners were severely moderate. For some time, I have been given a vague but tenacious impression that the question of church and state was raised and considered most effectively during the nation-building of the United States, and that this nation devised the first viable modern solution to the church and state problem—that is, something other than decapitating the divine head of the state—by, essentially, separating them. And, somewhere in the region of precritical imagination, this impression seems to be deeply allied with another prevalent idea, namely, that the modern state, or state proper, came to be what it is (i.e., secular) rather recently, through a process now dubbed “exit from religion.”

According to this vision: In the beginning was Church and everything was in Church; after millennia of tyranny, oligarchy, and half-way attempts at democracy, the ideal of State (if not the reality of it) finally began to emerge in modern times with the parliament and the constitution in hand, leaving behind the authoritarian body of Church, as the latter shrank to an entrenched territory of privacy, domesticity, and ethnicity. This compact and didactic treatise from the 19th century may serve as a useful corrective to this myopic vision, whose sense of the past seems as flat as the painted backdrop of a diorama. I am not suggesting that this author offers an alternative, more factually accurate account of the entire history of Western Christendom. Rather, this book itself is a testimony to altogether different modes of thinking about this issue, and and material evidence that some delightfully lucid and vibrant intellects were engaged in the church and state argument from a wholly different angle.

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Patrick Lee Miller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University

Time in the Ditch, by John McCumber, recounts the effects of the McCarthy era on American philosophers, arguing that they adapted to its political pressures by eschewing the continental tradition that aroused suspicion. Trading Hegel through Heidegger for an analytic style detached from historical and political reality, they put themselves above this suspicion, but thereby curtailed their participation in debates about, say, religion, secularism, and public life. Readers of this blog who have noticed few participants from philosophy departments will thus find an explanation of this misfortune.

Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, by Peter Fonagy (et al.), explains how most children acquire the ability to mentalize—that is, to imagine the contents of others’ minds—and how failure to do so produces adult pathologies of affect and self. Mentalization requires developing a sense of self as distinct from others, and this happens when caregivers reflect infants’ affects in the right way. Only so can children internalize affect-representations which allow them to distinguish their own affects from those of others. Only with such representations, moreover, can they regulate their affects and themselves. Anyone interested in the politics of recognition, for example, will profit from this book’s abundant evidence from experimental psychology and clinical psychonalaysis.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, is widely discussed but less widely read. Rightly famous because it bottles the spirit of our times, it is difficult to finish for that very reason. A secular age obliges us to search for our own meaning in life, rather than to credulously accept one already scripted by a dominant religion, but Wallace shows how easily addiction—whether to substances, entertainment, or excellence—can become a substitute for this search, with predictably dreary consequences for our public life.

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John Lardas Modern, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College

Given my interest in the metaphysical schemes of secularism, the most memorable book I read last summer was Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007). In it Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison examine technics of representation within the natural sciences—from the meticulous lithographs of Linnaeus to digital images of rolling nanospheres—to mark the emergence of objectivity over the past few centuries.

I am currently in the middle of Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (1976). This novel also revolves around the aesthetics of reason. To the point, it offers clipped yet dense scenes of particular styles of analytic thinking in action: how they feel; their linguistic symmetry, incoherence, as well as dead-ends; their textured allure for those who don’t yet inhabit them; the fears generated by them as well as the expectations that fuel them.

The action takes place at Field Experiment One, a research compound and bureaucratic maze comprised of a goofy array of physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and social scientists. They have all been enlisted to decipher a strange transmission emanating from outer space.

The reader is introduced to the cast of characters by way of Billy Twillig, a fourteen year-old Nobel laureate in mathematics who, upon arrival, meets Cyril Kyriakos sitting on a picnic quilt in the compound’s topiary gardens. Cyril, a transitional logician, is unsure about the mission of Field Experiment One and his role in it. He has, however, enjoyed his picnics and his time on the committee formed to define the word “science.”

“In addition to his work on the substance of the definition, Cyril headed a subcommittee devoted solely to phrasing.” Cyril’s subcommittee includes J. Graham Hummer, “widely known as the instigator of the MIT language riots.” Hummer, in his “antiseptic manner,” insists that “phrasing is the element that makes or breaks the definition . . . The phrasing is the definition. An analysis of how we say what we are saying is itself a statement of the precise meaning of the word we are defining.”

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John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies, Missouri State University

I began the summer with two fabulous trade books in American intellectual history, Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s (2009) and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001). Werth’s story of Herbert Spencer’s American tour remains relevant to a nation recovering from free market fundamentalism, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning Menand shows why he was the right person to lead Harvard’s recent curriculum review. Both pay close attention to the role of religion in American thought and its gradual marginalization.

I especially enjoyed Eve LaPlante’s American Jezebel (2005), a biography of Puritan rebel Anne Hutchinson. Last fall I learned that Hutchinson is my ancestor, a fact that surprised me as much as it did my students. I took it personally when the Texas Board of Education discussed removing her from its state history curriculum. The best treatments of this summer’s attack on my foremother can be found in Paul Harvey’s “The Eyes of David Barton Are Upon You” and John Fea’s Houston Chronicle Op-Ed.

Inspired by the tea parties and the birthers, I finally read Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” parts of which sound surprisingly contemporary. Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002) provides a useful corrective to Hofstadter’s tendency to pathologize and psychologize conservative politics. The fearful tone of this summer’s town halls makes me want to pick up Jason Bivins’s Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. Maybe reading about Jack Chick tracts and Hell Houses will explain why fears of death panels and socialism threaten to derail meaningful health care reform.

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Read previous responses here.

With the dog-days of August already at hand and the fall semester just around the corner, we’ve been curious about what our contributors have read these past few months. So we asked: What are the best books and essays you’ve come across this summer? What are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?

Responses will be posted throughout the week.

Today’s panelists are:

Colin Jager, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

Simon During, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in Saint Louis

Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Yale University

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program, SUNY-Buffalo

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Colin Jager, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between enchantment and realism,which has driven me back to two classics from the 1980s: George Levine’s The Realistic Imagination and Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. I also read Levine’s Darwin Loves You this summer. I continue to think about Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment and the ramifications of his argument that the mainstream Enlightenment was continually prodded by Spinozism. I hope to read more Spinoza soon, and try to figure out why he appeals so strongly today. And I want to read the new Terry Eagleton book, and a book on Hamann by John Betz called After Enlightenment.

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Simon During, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

The new technologies, which have severed the connection between the book and the text, have changed my reading life. I say that as a confirmed, indeed obsessional, book collector. So, on the Eucalyptus app on my iPhone (the best app I know for iPhone reading), and in five minute snatches (waiting for the shuttle bus, sitting in my 3yr old’s darkened room helping her to go to sleep….) I’ve been reading through Macaulay’s History of England, one of the great 19th century texts, about which everything we think we know seems to be beside the point. I tend to use my Kindle outside the US (except to read the Times and the Nation) and especially where battery recharging might be difficult. So, a few days ago, holed up at LAX for a 12 hour wait between flights on an Australian trip, I downloaded Zoe Heller’s The Believers, Nick Laird’s Glover’s Mistake and Colin Toibin’s Brooklyn so as to keep up to speed with contemporary British literary fiction. The 12 hours flew away. But I don’t regret that I don’t own these works in more durable form. As to actual material books: this summer has been largely dedicated to rereading Maurice Blanchot (the reason why is complex) with the wonderful John Wood translation of The Magic Mountain as light relief. And then poetry, a genre I need to read in print, on paper. This summer’s finds include my colleague (and immanent frame blogger) Chris Nealon’s wonderful latest collection, Plummet, and John Fuller’s Selected Poems (Fuller is an Auden disciple, a civic poet who uses language very thickly, smearing words into shape.) What’s next? I’m eying Alan Myers’s translation of Dostoevesky’s The Idiot, or maybe Alisdair Gray’s 1982, Janine for non-academic novel reading. And Elizabeth Jenning’s Collected Poems for my verse fix.

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John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in Saint Louis

Let me pervert the question and say that the most important book I am reading on the topic is Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, important for its role in public life. It is the most persuasive and thus most unsettling of the recent books in the (unfortunately) growing genre of “Europe’s already caved in to fast-breeding, intolerant Muslims, and we are next!” books, featured at your local Barnes & Noble. The book masterfully distorts demography, intentions, worship, and scriptural interpretations, postulating, along the lines of an older style of American Islamologist, that one can best decipher what a Muslim has in mind by looking to the Qur’an. The argument that Muslims all do have the same thing in mind (try to take over the world), specious though it might be, is all too appealing to many frightened readers. We can, however, respond with facts and common sense.

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Kathryn Lofton, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies, Yale University

Among the few new(ish) works I was able to read, I enjoyed digging into two edited collections: Secularisms (edited by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini) and Religion and Its Other (edited by Heike Bock, Jörg Feuchter and Michi Knecht). Secularisms maps the field of secular studies with an elegance and thematic consistency unusual for edited collections. Despite its topical pluralism, there are threading commitments to explorations of the feminist, nationalist, and historical consequences of secular diagnoses. Depending on my mood, any number of the essays are my favorites, but in today’s recollection Laura Levitt’s stands out as a response to an important categorical problem as well as just reading beautifully (a welcome uniformity among the essays). Religion and Its Other offers several essays on early modern materials, and Kristine Krause’s piece on healing rituals in contemporary Ghanaian hospitals would be a great addition to courses on secularism, science, or ritual studies. Some of the most exciting materials I read this summer, though, are forthcoming, and represent the wide swath of methodological engagement with religion and the secular: John Lardas Modern, a contributor to this blog and a leading young scholar of American religion, is currently finishing Haunted Modernity; or, the Metaphysics of Secularism in Antebellum America, which will be forthcoming from Chicago in 2010; my new colleague, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, is working on a remarkable rumination called No Separation: How Religion Makes the Secular State, which builds upon lines of inquiry he began in his earlier monographs on Stanley Cavell and Focus on the Family; and Elizabeth Clark, whose contributions to the studies of Late Antique religion, gender studies, and critical historiography have defined those fields, is completing a manuscript, Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America that offers a comprehensive rendering of the emergence of a ‘secular’ religious studies from seminarian pursuits of primitive Christianities.

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Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program, SUNY-Buffalo

While on holiday in Turkey this summer (in Istanbul and Cappadocia), I read three novels set in modern Turkey. I recommend them all. Reading fiction is, for me, a perfect antidote to the seductive narratives of secularization. As is being in Turkey. Cheap stories of modernity seem somehow ridiculous when considered in the context of good fiction and the complex realities of contemporary Turkey. First, Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, a 1956 novel recently reprinted by The New York Review of Books. The narrator is a young woman artist who tags along on an ill-conceived trip organized by her eccentric aunt and a rather repellent high Anglican priest to convert the Turks. It is a very funny, very English, and very beautiful, novel of theological manners. If you have any tolerance for mid-twentieth century English satire, you will laugh out loud while being astonished by the theological sophistication and seriousness of this wonderful novel. Second, I read The New Life by Orhan Pamuk (1995). I have read and very much liked his others. Another first person narrative of self-discovery, The New Life is both spooky and absorbing, a mysterious and cautionary tale about the supposed power and authority of books. Finally, I read Mehmet My Hawk by Yasar Kemal (1955), a swashbuckling and often blood-curdling story of life and death centering on a Robin Hood like brigand in southeastern Turkey.

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