Monthly Archive for April, 2011

From The Economist

“Religion is ubiquitous but it is not universal. That is a conundrum for people trying to explain it. Religious types, noting the ubiquity (though not everyone is religious, all human societies have religions), argue that this proves religion is a real reflection of the underlying nature of things. Sceptics wonder why, if that is the case, it comes in such a variety of flavours, from the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to the cargo cults of Papua New Guinea—each of which seems to find the explanations offered by the others anathema.

To bring a little scientific order to the matter, researchers taking part in a multinational project called Explaining Religion have spent three years gathering data on various aspects of religious practice and on the sorts of moral behaviour that religions often claim to govern. The data-collection phase was wrapped up at the end of 2010, and the results are starting to be published.”

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Image courtesy of Renjith Krishnan

By John D. Boy, in The Immanent Frame

Recently, a somewhat opaque term found its way onto the front page of The Immanent Frame in the title of Daromir Rudnyckyj’s piece on “post-secular development.” This term, “postsecular,” also came up a few months ago in Nathan Schneider’s interview with Simon During as well as a string of other entries in this blog over the past few years. A group of contributors to The Immanent Frame, including its founding editor Jonathan VanAntwerpen and editor-at-large David Kyuman Kim, are even involved in editing a volume called The Post-Secular in Question. Apparently the term is quickly becoming a keyword for scholars of religion and public life. So, what is it all about?

The concept is not just all over The Immanent Frame. It has also appeared in the titles of about forty books, most in English and German, the majority of which were published within the past five years. Additionally, the concept features prominently in seventeen dissertations indexed by ProQuest, which largely reflects dissertations completed at North American universities. More than half of these dissertations were deposited after 2007. And that is to say nothing of the dozens of articles in scholarly journals that are an important part of the discussion of the postsecular, or the approximately half-dozen academic conferences held on both sides of the Atlantic in the last three years. These numbers indicate that both established and emerging scholars are staking their work on the concept of the postsecular. Finally, illustrating a broader trend in intellectual debate, significant interventions in the discussion have also appeared online, especially at Eurozine, ResetDOC, and on this very blog.

To read more…