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This article considers the recent reemergence of the category of animism in the anthropological study of religion, a concept that has once again become fashionable after a long period of scholarly disuse. This \"new animism,\" as it is called by many of its proponents, seeks to move away from the original animism that was the basis for much Victorian thought on indigenous religions and which rested upon now largely discredited social evolutionist paradigms. I discuss this renewed interest in indigenous animism in terms of its place within recent intellectual history, especially the growing engagement with the global environmental crisis among scholars in the humanities. I argue that the new animism is only selectively \"indigenous\" in its promotion of non-Western ontologies, and suggest that it is ultimately best understood as a kind of analytical metaphor rather than an objective category of religious practice that exists out there in the world.

This article reframes the history of religious studies by excavating a central context for its formal consolidation as an academic field: university containment of antiracist student movements. It chronicles this process as it occurred at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) between 1960 and 1975. Student activists appealed to liberation theologies in demanding that HDS take direct, redistributive action against racism and militarism. Administrators responded with rejoinders to a practice of cross-cultural encounter, sympathetic dialogue, and pluralism. Decades before the critique of religion entered a mainstream scholarly lexicon, HDS students attacked this discourse as a technology of racial formation, which separated proper civil subjects from extremists lacking discipline. Meanwhile, as pluralism emerged as the preferred approach to the study of religion at Harvard and around the nation, it circumscribed the field’s critical possibilities. No more would religion provide ground for materialist cultural critique; rather it would be a site for the celebration of positive difference.

The present article reviews the identification of “Hilbert Problems” in the scientific study of religion as presented in a call for papers and a subsequent special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior (2015; 2017). Specific attention is herein devoted to some overlooked epistemological and methodological issues, that is, mathematical Platonism and presentism. Most importantly, notwithstanding the advances produced by the recent experimental turn in the cognitive science of religion, this paper recognizes the existence of a “historical problem” in the field, that is, a belittling or neglect of historiography and nonmathematical sciences. Since most of such biases are also embedded in the original Hilbert Problems, a historiographical reanalysis of the cultural context in which the Hilbert Problems were advanced is provided. Finally, the paper proposes a list of themes in urgent need of a reappraisal and argues for a sustained multi-disciplinary collaboration with the ultimate aim to promote cross-disciplinary integration.

Although explicitly challenging overly simplistic dichotomies between secular reason and religious affect, Charles Taylor’s monumental genealogy A Secular Age (2007) downplays the role of the body in Descartes’s theory of agency and mistakenly projects this understanding of the “Cartesian” self upon the public sphere of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a careful reading of Descartes’s last work, Les Passions de l’Âme (1649), and drawing on existing work by Cottingham (2012), Kahn (2006), and Kirkebøen (2001), this article argues the Passions is better seen as an attempt to reinscribe politics in the body through Descartes’s theory of the habit. A focus on the latter yields a complex understanding of the emergence of the public sphere, not as a neutral space for the free exchange of rational speech acts, but as a power-driven environment shaped by the manipulation of habit-creating experiences. The article ends by considering some implications for the genealogy of our “secular age.”

Religion scholars require a theory of public encounter that is evental, technological, and affective. Instead of a spatial public sphere, today’s encounters occur through technological mediations that are affective and image-laden. This essay examines the latter “publicness” and illustrates its roles as an affective technology of whiteness as that which frames and distributes the persevering powers of, and reluctantly tracks resistances to, white supremacy. Film is a fruitful cultural site for examining the whiteness of publicness. The essay turns to Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) to demonstrate how film can resist and interrupt normative whiteness and to show how this transvaluative cultural labor can be seen as religious. The essay conceptualizes religion as a hinged form and function through which subjects and publics co-emerge and by which social and sedimented valuations are (re)bound. Grappling with religion as social forms and functions of valuation opens it to algorithmic variability that mandates attention to circulations of power as both capacity and intensity.

This article identifies an overlooked strand of post-secular thought, which I call “transformational.” Transformational post-secularism differs from other prominent post-secularisms by envisioning the emergence of a new socio-spiritual order that transcends modern secularism without abandoning its commitment to diversity. This article clarifies the main features of transformational post-secularism and identifies the historical context in which it arose. As part of this analysis, I argue that, contrary to Khaled Furani’s claim that post-secular discourse arose in the late 1990s, it actually began in the 1950s as part of a wider “crisis of man” debate. I also suggest that the axial age discourse, which crystallized at the same time and has gained significant influence in recent years, constitutes a main arena in which transformational post-secular thinking has, over the last seven decades, evolved. I conclude by considering the plausibility and potential applications of the idea of transformational post-secularism, which includes responding to Mahmood’s and Furani’s suggestion that scholars drop the term “post-secular” from their lexicon.

This article challenges academic explorations of Orientalism as an interaction between a white West and an Asian East within the context of American Buddhist communities. Taking as its focus twentieth-and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels. It argues that black Buddhists’ writings rework Orientalist discourse to empower black Buddhists within predominantly white communities. These writings challenge assumptions that the normative Buddhist subject is white, male, and heteronormative. Additionally, they portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.

This article addresses the pervasiveness of white supremacy in American identity-thinking. Challenging the use of identity to structure unity platforms in academia, I advocate for Black-transnational feminist-queer strategies that demand coalition-based politics oriented around a transformative radical potential. Religious studies is used as an inter-disciplinary case study to understand the problem of academic identity-thinking, where I show first, how white privilege is maintained in the “scholar-practitioner” divide, and second, how white supremacy is naturalized in identity-thinking. Eschewing relative or comparative approaches that reify identity-based logics, I move towards analytic and technical approaches that are productive of an activist-oriented decolonial stance. This gesture draws on the relationality, conflict, tension, power, and politics of studying racialized religious and spiritual subjects with an unapologetically transformative agenda.

Although “secularity” is often contrasted with “religion” as though the distinction between them bisected society, sorting practices and people into competing kinds, their relation is better understood as analogous to that between a frame and what is framed by it: secularity so conceived is not simply the inverse, negative space of religion but the epistemic regime that enables us to speak of “religion” in the first place, as a particular object of modern interest and anxiety. Secularity, I contend, can be understood temporally as that time in which religion occupies space. This paper draws upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of “Messianic time” to gain critical leverage on the temporal horizons of the nation-state and the neoliberal market.

The esteemed scholar Michael Cook has recently argued that political freedom is “not an Islamic value” but is in tension with Islam. This paper contends that Cook is mistaken. It moves in four steps. First, I consider the very idea of an “Islamic value,” sketching a nonessentialist way of conceiving such a thing. Next, I show that the particular “liberal” notion of political freedom that Cook rightly claims is absent is but one of three distinct conceptions of political freedom: he neglects to consider the possible presence of an alternate “republican” conception. Then, taking some of the very evidence Cook cites along with the case of al-Ghazālī, I show that this republican conception figures in Islamic thought and practice. I conclude by considering some broader interpretive issues that bear on this matter and have wider significance. Political freedom, it turns out, is an Islamic value after all.