Working in four scholarly teams focused on different global regions-North America, the European Union, the Middle East, and China-the contributors to Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging examine how new political worlds intersect with locally specific articulations of religion and secularism. The chapters address many topics, including the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Tunisia after the 2010 revolution, the influence of religion on the sharp turn to the political right in Western Europe, understandings of Confucianism as a form of secularism, and the alliance between evangelical Christians and neoliberal business elites in the United States since the 1970s. This volume also provides a methodological template for how humanities scholars around the world can collaboratively engage with sweeping issues of global significance.
Contributors. Markus Balkenhol, Elizabeth Bentley, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, David N. Gibbs, Ori Goldberg, Marcia Klotz, Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, Leerom Medovoi, Eva Midden, Mohanad Mustafa, Mu-chou Poo, Shaul Setter, John Vignaux Smith, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ernst van den Hemel, Albert Welter, Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Raef Zreik
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"Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging attends to transnational particularities as a way to address global realities. The book brings together teams of scholars working in different geographic areas and developing their analyses through engagement with each other and the world. Starting from the multiplicity of secularisms and the entanglement of secularism, religion, and political belonging, they build connections between the politics of critique and the ethics of care." -- Janet R. Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University
"Leerom Medovoi and Elizabeth Bentley have put together a rich comparative volume on the complexities of religion and secularism that indicates the range and varieties of both as well as the intense interactions between them in different national and global contexts. This compelling and unique collection will be taken up by many readers concerned with questions of religion, the secular, and the political." -- David Theo Goldberg, author of * Are We All Postracial Yet? *
"For the student and scholar of secularisms, Religion, Secularism, & Political Belonging provides a worthwhile and useful selection of content and conversation partners. . . . A book of this nature cannot be comprehensive; it is a beginning to further conversations. It can, however, be provocative and insightful. . . . It is a good thing to read a book on such a heady topic and come away interested and ready for more." -- Zachariah S. Motts * Religion *