Commentary on "Siting Pluralism"

There are some things we seem to need to learn over and over and over. Among them are the ways in which modern legal efforts to expel the sacred—or, perhaps more pointedly, as Neena Mahadev shows in her article, interventions to end it—condemn us to its constant reproduction. State secularism result...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers 1950- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Berghahn [2019]
In: Religion and society
Year: 2019, Volume: 10, Issue: 1, Pages: 168-170
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Secularism / Religious pluralism
IxTheo Classification:AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism
AD Sociology of religion; religious policy
AX Inter-religious relations
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
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Summary:There are some things we seem to need to learn over and over and over. Among them are the ways in which modern legal efforts to expel the sacred—or, perhaps more pointedly, as Neena Mahadev shows in her article, interventions to end it—condemn us to its constant reproduction. State secularism results not in the evacuation of the sacred but in an almost neurotic picking at the scab of the wound—and the continuous management of what Hussein Agrama (2012: 186) has called the "problem-space of secularism." The four articles collected here are exemplary in their fine-grained analysis of this reality, both of the often pathetic inadequacy of regulatory efforts and, even more interestingly, of the glimpses we have of religious life lived in the in-between spaces of formal policing efforts, whether of church or state. The spatial gesture uniting this collection—siting pluralism—proves particularly potent. Sometimes imagined as uncompromisingly singular (i.e., spatial ‘locative' religion as opposed to utopian portable religion) and at other times as spatial in a plural, less exclusive sense, the spaces/places of these articles are teeming with contradiction and multiplicity.
ISSN:2150-9301
Contains:Enthalten in: Religion and society
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3167/arrs.2019.100112