Secularism Archives | Contending Modernities

The Holy in Hindsight: A Reply to the Readers

Series: Symposium on The Political Lives of Saints

Angie Heo
November 1, 2019November 1, 2019

Like my fellow scholars of religion here, I am dissatisfied with reading religion as the mere fodder for manipulation and control. The major challenge remains a deeper understanding of what religion and political theology can enact beyond the authoritarian state’s grip.

Wonderwork

Series: Symposium on The Political Lives of Saints

Kathryn Lofton
October 30, 2019October 31, 2019

Heo seems to be saying that the more the miraculous, oil-exuding religious is routed away from the public, the more the public starves for real religious feeling.

The Secret Life of Miracles

Series: Symposium on The Political Lives of Saints

Anand Taneja
October 28, 2019October 30, 2019

Heo shows us how living with a proliferation of images, as we all do in modernity, is also to live with knowledge and affects that breach the boundaries not just between religions, but between the domains of the religious and the secular.

Memory, Anachronism, and Belonging

Series: Symposium on The Political Lives of Saints

Rachel Smith
October 24, 2019

In the broadest sense, what Heo challenges is the secular assumption that religion itself is anachronistic.

Introduction to Book Symposium On The Political Lives of Saints

Series: Symposium on The Political Lives of Saints

Joshua Lupo
October 24, 2019October 30, 2019

By thinking outside the US and European context about how secular and religious forces interact in the modern world, Heo’s book reminds us of the theoretical richness that is gained from expanding our accounts of religion and secularism.

Weaponizing Antisemitism under the Guise of Care

Series: Trump and Dual Loyalty

Joyce Dalsheim
September 16, 2019September 16, 2019

Suggesting that Jews are disloyal to the modern state of Israel is a form of antisemitism, thinly veiled in terms of caring about Jews.

Pluralism, Secularism, and Anti/Philo-Semitism

Series: Reexamining Religion and Modernities

Geneviève Zubrzycki
August 24, 2018October 4, 2018

How can Poland, one of the most ethnically, denominationally, and religiously homogenous nation-states in the world, counter the empirical absence of ethnic, racial, and religious plurality to meet the modern political goals of pluralism and multi-culturalism?

2018 World Cup and Multicultural Belgium

Nadia Fadil
July 12, 2018October 4, 2018

It is precisely this absence of a unified national project that allows for a triumphant recuperation of national symbols by ethnic minorities.

Drepung monastery is one of the largest monasteries in Tibet. It was from here that the 2nd through the 5th Dalai Lama lived and ruled - until the 5th commissioned the Potala to be built.

On Sameness, Difference and Wholeness

Series: Religion Book Symposium

Anne C. Klein
February 16, 2018

When we study medicine, biology, even the arts, we understand that every human being is much more like us than not. But with religion, difference dominates.