Part 1: Why i am not a postsecularist

Boundary 2

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 55-76

  Robbins, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84877025182     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2072873     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Jürgen Habermas, "A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society," an interview by Eduardo Mendieta, trans. Matthias Fritsch, posted on the Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/A-Postsecular-World- Society-TIF.pdf.
2. With some understatement, David Hollinger remarks, "Believers in the secular public sphere in the US are now on the defensive." See "Separation Anxiety," a review of Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, London Review of Books 30, no. 2 (January 24, 2008): 15-18.
3. James Wood has argued that notoriously extreme versions of this view, like the Reverend Pat Robertson's announcement that the Haiti earthquake of January 2010 was God's punishment of the Haitian people for their misdeeds, are unfortunately much closer to the mainstream than they appear. James Wood, "Between God and a Hard Place," New York Times, January 24, 2010.
4. Doug Henwood, "Awe, Shocks," Left Business Observer 117 (March 2008), http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Shock.html.
5. Sarah Bracke and Maggie Schmitt, "A Battle over Transcendence: Confronting Post-secular and Religious Perspectives" (paper presented at the ReStating Religion Conference, Columbia University, New York, March 23-24 2006). This and subsequent quotations are from a typescript the authors provided for participants in the conference.
6. Both José Casanova and Veena Das suggest (correctly, in my view) that much too much causal power is attributed to secularism in the influential postsecular arguments of Talal Asad. See José Casanova, "Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad,"
7. and Veena Das, "Secularism and the Argument from Nature," in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 12-30 and 93-112, respectively. For what it's worth, natural science is not hegemonic secularism, either: consider both the hold that religion has over popular opinion and, on the other hand, the fact that theoretical physics is being defunded.
8. Ma'an News Agency, Jerusalem, June 18, 2011.
9. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PP.
10. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 15.
11. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), vi. People believe in God, Russell says, because they "wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you" (14).
12. Ramendra, Why I Am Not a Hindu and Why I Do Not Want Ramrajya (Patna: Bihar Rationalist Society, 1993), 15.
13. See also the title by the dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996).
14. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 31.
15. Scott McLemee, "After the Postsecular," Inside Higher Education (blog), August 4, 2010, accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.insidehighered.com/ views/mclemee/mclemee301.
16. His subject is Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, eds., After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).
17. A reminder of the initial and continuing rationale for secularism in this sense was available when Florida pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in March 2011, touching off murderous violence in Afghanistan. Roger Cohen, "Religion Does Its Worst," New York Times, April 5, 2011.
18. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and University of California Press, 2009). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as ICS.
19. In March 2011, a Pakistani minister who supported reform of Pakistan's 1970s blasphemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone judged to be speaking against the Prophet Muhammad, was assassinated. He was a Christian, and could be called a secularist in the limited sense of (1) favoring the peaceful coexistence of different religions, and (2) setting limits to any religion's sway over public policy. It would be interesting to know whether, in Mahmood's opinion, the issue here is the minister's failure to understand the feelings of the Islamic militants who killed him. Salman Masood and Jane Perlez, "Gunmen Kill Pakistani Cabinet Minister," New York Times, March 2, 2011.
20. In an essay on Asad, David Scott suggests (correctly, in my view) that there is a significant and unresolved tension in Asad's work between the genealogical impulse, associated with Foucault-the impulse behind Asad's account, for example, of how the category of religion emerged as a European construct-and a very different but less visible impulse to speak in the name of tradition, an impulse that Scott associates with the conservative Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre. Tradition seems a gentler word for essentialist mythology. David Scott, "The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad," in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 134-53.
21. Luce Irigaray, "Divine Women, Venice - Mestre, June 8, 1984," in Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 68.
22. John Milbank, "The Ethics of Self - Sacrifice," First Things, March 1999, accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/ 004-the-ethics-of-self-sacrifice-20.
23. "We Have Never Been Secular: Re-thinking the Sacred," graduate student conference, Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, April 9, 2010.
24. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 8.
25. See, for example, Bidyut Chakrabarty, Social and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Routledge, 2006), 101-2.
26. For further nuance, see Makarand R. Paranjape, "'Natural Supernaturalism?' The Tagore - Gandhi Debate on the Bihar Earthquake," Journal of Hindu Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 176-204.