Rethinking Secularism: P. Harrison, É. Balibar, T. Asad: The Territories of Science and Religion; Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics; Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason

Authors

Sotiris Mitralexis

Abstract

I will discuss here three recent books that both directly and indirectly discuss religion and secularism, in different contexts and certainly from different perspectives; one by historian Peter Harrison, one by cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, and one by philosopher Étienne Balibar. All three authors have invested a sizable part of their scholarly career in studying religion/secularism, and the books reviewed are revised collections of relatively recent lectures and essays (rather than, for example, texts authored with the explicit purpose of comprising a monograph); this entails that each of these books is, so to speak, the distillate of a career in working on the concepts and realities discussed here.

Recommended Citation

Mitralexis, Sotiris (2019) "Rethinking Secularism: P. Harrison, É. Balibar, T. Asad: The Territories of Science and Religion; Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics; Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason," International Dialogue: Vol. 9, Article 5.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.ID.9.1.1166
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/id-journal/vol9/iss1/5