In recent decades, the term “post-secular” has emerged as a methodology, conceptual investment, and/or posture of critique in the interdisciplinary humanities. Most often, these “post-secular” frameworks have sought to critically interrogate, and potentially even supersede, the putatively secularist logics embedded into twentieth-century scholarly treatments of religion. Yet what differences does this “post-secular turn” name, and what historical, intellectual, and political attachments are at play in its deployment? Papers in this session seek to inquire more deeply into questions like these from a range of perspectives. Presenters will draw on disciplinary conversations taking place in fields such as literary studies, legal theory, decolonial philosophy, and US-American historiography to explore the possibilities, assumptions, and problematics underlying the "post-secular turn" (as well as related "turns") within contemporary academic scholarship. Papers will likewise underscore how this work might better inform scholarly accounts of both religion and the secular today.
This paper returns to an old question—“Is critique secular?”—in order to ask a new one: “Is the post-critical turn post-secular?” The famous 2007 symposium on the question of secular critique imagined a shared affective posture between secularism and critique itself: relentless skepticism towards perceived reality, and an equally relentless hunger to unveil the worldly constructions masquerading as metaphysical Absolutes. Almost 20 years later, “post” critical and “post” secular both gesture vaguely towards a revisionist mood that hungers for more hopeful, more horizontal, more constructive, and more ethically responsible paradigms of interpretation. By reading Sedgwick’s description of reparative reading alongside Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, I take stock of the post-secular’s strange critical posture, one as uninvested in distinguishing between representation and the real as it is invested in affect as an interpretative apparatus.
Scholars invested in the so-called “post-secular turn” often argue that critically deconstructing the religion-secular binary and interrogating the modernist assertion that the political and legal spheres should remain epistemologically “secular” will promote religious pluralism and respect for religious difference. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, however, the very same theoretical claims underlying notions of the “post-secular” are also, ironically, being exploited with increasing frequency by the American conservative legal movement (CLM) to advance Christian supremacy. Through a critical examination of the language, structure, and organizing logics of recent Supreme Court decisions, I elucidate a significant and problematic inconsistency pervading majority opinions that aids in this work: whereas recent non-establishment holdings deconstruct the religion-secular binary into a nullity so that state actions may countenance distinctly Christian practices, symbols, and truth claims, concurrent free exercise rulings reify the binary in order to posit “secular” state animus toward conservative Christian beliefs.
This paper intervenes into the debate on the secular and the postsecular by offering a decolonial interpretation of the postsecular that does not entail a regressive process of “desecularization,” as Walter Mignolo has argued for. Following a reflexively dialectical account of the historical process of secularization, I argue that the “post” in the “postsecular” ought to be understood as a shifting self-consciousness of secularity that makes possible the re-constitution of an ongoing process of secularization. So rather than expecting to jettison “the secular” in its entirety, there is room for a decolonial rebuilding of secularity that critically re-draws the boundaries between the secular and the religious without necessarily endorsing the well-known Eurocentrism of conventional postsecular positions. This dynamic is illustrated by way of the transmodern proposal developed by Enrique Dussel, which aims to systematize what it means to think “beyond the assumptions of modernity, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and colonialism.”
How should scholars of religion take supernatural phenomena seriously without abandoning critical explanation? This paper revisits that question--long important to the cultural history of the study of religion--through the late nineteenth-century writings of Mary Baker Eddy and other Christian Science practitioners. We argue that supernatural healings became experientially real through practitioners’ disciplined religious labor and their engagements with texts, bodies, and objects, while also remaining shadowed by doubt, failure, and dispute. We further posit that the Christian Science case exposes limits in approaches associated with the “ontological turn,” on the rise in religious studies today, which posits multiple incommensurable worlds and insulates religious claims from analysis. Against this trend, we propose a method grounded in ontological realism (the claim that all actors inhabit a shared world structured by common constraints and resources), which treats Christian Science healing as a creative but contestable composition of our shared world.