The buffered self and the battle of ideas
As I read Wendy Brown’s recent post on A Secular Age, I see that I made a bad job of communicating my intent. I organized the book in sections, and the main thrust of my account comes in the first...
View ArticleA story to tell
[I]t is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we...
View ArticleAkbar Ganji in conversation with Charles Taylor
[Following the introduction below by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, we are posting excerpts from a dialogue between Akbar Ganji and Charles Taylor. The interview took place over two days in April of...
View ArticleAfter purification
Webb Keane’s central claim in Christian Moderns, if I understand correctly, is that this modern Euro-American culture is characterized by a certain “semiotic ideology” that is, in turn, embedded in a...
View ArticleWhen strong is weak
It is a testament to the power of the “strong program” image that most commentators on our working paper read Matt May and me to be optimistically praising its emergence in the sociology of religion,...
View ArticlePower spots
“Shoveling fog” is Courtney Bender’s acute phrase for the work of “studying spirituality,” an amorphous term that has suffered much scorn and derision at the hands of both scholars and skeptics,...
View ArticleComparing the incommensurate
David Buckley’s recent post in Notes from the field raises a crucial methodological question. On what basis is comparative work to be done if the methods of comparison developed by the culture of...
View ArticleA note on secular comparison
In Comparing the incommensurate, Vincent Pecora builds on David Buckley’s recent inquiry about methods of comparison and the challenges that arise when these methods are inherently rooted in analyst...
View ArticleOn reductionism
Social scientists—myself included—are often criticized for resorting to some form or other of reductionism in our work. The criticism is sometimes warranted; at other times it simply becomes a facile...
View ArticleCritiquing reductionism
Our debates during the workshop were not only about the instrumental function of “reductive” categories (discussed in Brandon’s post), but—as I repeatedly insisted—the relationship between those...
View ArticleThe view from Berlin: An interview with Hubert Knoblauch
Hubert Knoblauch is a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Berlin, where he specializes in general sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of religion. A student...
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