What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

Interrogating Secularism is a call to rethink binary categories of “religion” and “secularism” in contemporary Arab American fiction and art. While most studies that explore the traffic between literature and issues of secularism emphasize how canonical texts naturalize and reinforce secular values, Interrogating Secularism approaches this nexus through novels written by and about ethnic and religious minorities. Haque juxtaposes accounts of secular experience in the writing of Arab Anglophone authors such as Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Laila Lalami, and Rawi Hage, with Arab and Muslim artists such as Ninar Esber, Mounir Fatmi, Hasan Elahi, and Emily Jacir. Looking at multiple genres and modes of aesthetic production, including AIDS narratives, visual art, and digital media, Haque explores how their conventions are used to subvert the ideals tied to secularism and the various anxieties and investments that support secularism as a premise. These authors and artists critique Western iterations of secular thought in spaces such as art exhibits, airports, borders, and literary discourses to capture how the secularism thesis reproduces the exclusivity it intends to remedy.

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Disrupting recent fashionable debates on secularism, this book raises the stakes on how we understand the space of the secular, independent of its battle with the religious, as a space of radical democratic politics that refuse to be theologized.

In a sweeping reconsideration of the relation between religion and modernity, Jose Casanova surveys the roles that religions may play in the public sphere of modern societies. During the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, began making their way, often forcefully, out of the private sphere and into public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. No longer content merely to administer pastoral care to individual souls, religious institutions are challenging dominant political and social forces, raising questions about the claims of entities such as nations and markets to be "value neutral", and straining the traditional connections of private and public morality. Casanova looks at five cases from two religious traditions (Catholicism and Protestantism) in four countries (Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). These cases challenge postwar—and indeed post-Enlightenment—assumptions about the role of modernity and secularization in religious movements throughout the world. This book expands our understanding of the increasingly significant role religion plays in the ongoing construction of the modern world.

This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.

This volume interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as their point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, these authors consider the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. They offer accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.