Religion and Secularity traces the history of the conceptual binary of religion and secularity in Europe and the repercussions it had in other regions and cultures of the Eurasian continent during the age of imperialism and beyond. Twelve authors from a wide range of disciplines, deal in their contributions with the trajectory, the concepts of „religion“ and „secularity/secularization“ took, as well as with the corresponding re-configurations of the religious field in a variety of cultures in Europe, the Near and Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. Taken together, these in-depth studies provide a broad comparative perspective on a penomenon that has been crucial for the development of globalized modernity and its regional interpretations.

How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.

Do scientists see conflict between science and faith? Which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Can scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? To answer these questions and more, the authors of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion completed the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists than we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists - even atheist scientists - see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

2011 Winner of the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize of the International Political Science Association This comparative analysis probes why conservative renderings of religious tradition in the United States, India, and Egypt remain so influential in the politics of these three ostensibly secular societies. The United States, Egypt, and India were quintessential models of secular modernity in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Islamists challenged the Egyptian government, India witnessed a surge in Hindu nationalism, and the Christian right in the United States rose to dominate the Republican Party and large swaths of the public discourse. Using a nuanced theoretical framework that emphasizes the interaction of religion and politics, Scott W. Hibbard argues that three interrelated issues led to this state of affairs. First, as an essential part of the construction of collective identities, religion serves as a basis for social solidarity and political mobilization. Second, in providing a moral framework, religion's traditional elements make it relevant to modern political life. Third, and most significant, in manipulating religion for political gain, political elites undermined the secular consensus of the modern state that had been in place since the end of World War II. Together, these factors sparked a new era of right-wing religious populism in the three nations. Although much has been written about the resurgence of religious politics, scholars have paid less attention to the role of state actors in promoting new visions of religion and society. Religious Politics and Secular States fills this gap by situating this trend within long-standing debates over the proper role of religion in public life.

Using Iran as a case study, Ghobadzadeh investigates the paradoxes of the Islamic state ideal. He develops the seemingly oxymoronic term "religious secularity" and uses it to describe the Islamic quest for a democratic secular state.

Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.