Secular Criticism Research Articles

Narrativizing the "Other": Joseph Conrad’s Art of Story-telling in Almayer’s Folly

This paper proposes to focus on Joseph Conrad’s narrative style in his first novel Almayer’s Folly, which has been so far neglected by most mainstream critics. Conrad’s narratives employ different narrative techniques in different texts that complicate the attempt to generalize about his narrative method or style. Still some distinctive features are common in his narratives. Critics so far agree to his modernist style that links the narrators with the characters as well to explore the deep psychology of both. When most of them find Conrad’s narrators as unreliable and reflexive especially in his Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and some other Western fictions, this essay investigates the author’s style in his debut novel, and drawing on Edward Said’s idea of “secular criticism”, finds a “secular style” of telling the story, by which Conrad achieves a kind of narrative detachment from the text and lends his narrators a transnational identity. By hiding the authorial identity and narrator’s location and racial or national perspectives, Conrad gains the confidence of his readers across the globe. That is why in the Malay trilogy, he makes his narrators nationless, and hence makes them appear as limited omniscient narrators who satirize the dominant cultural, racial, religious and political ideologies, especially the Western Imperialist hegemony. This is what makes Conrad both a writer of the East and the West. This paper critically evaluates this secular style of fiction writing in Almayer’s Folly.

The irreligiosity of the New Atheists movement as an expression of secular criticism of religion in modern society

The irreligiosity of the New Atheists movement as an expression of secular criticism of religion in modern society

The Spirit of the Pluriverse: Africana Spirit-Based Epistemologies and Interepistemic Thinking

Abstract In this article, I argue that interepistemic thinking is characteristic of Africana spirit-based epistemologies and that such thinking is essential to the construction of the pluriverse. I demonstrate that the spiritual basis of many Africana epistemologies facilitates interepistemic thinking and the making of a more equitable, functional, and healthy “modernity.” This is despite narratives of modernity, such as that of Max Weber, that are embedded in a secular-rationalist ideology, which tend to mark spirituality as an invalid means of accessing, representing, or (re)producing truth, marking it as “primitive,” destined to disappear, and as incompatible with the so-called modern world. For this reason, decoloniality as it applies to an analysis of Africana spirit-based epistemologies must demonstrate the limited, Eurocentric nature of the secular-rationalist paradigm. I support these arguments through an analysis of the role of interepistemic thinking in the spirit-based epistemologies apparent in what are commonly referred to as African diasporic religions. In doing so, I will also offer a critical perspective on the application of religion as a conceptual category to the realities of the peoples of the African diaspora, following important recent scholarship in the study of religion. I will begin with a review of the nature of the pluriverse and a brief description of Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s (2008) critique of secularism, followed by an analysis of interepistemic thinking as it can be observed within Africana spirit-based epistemologies, and conclude with an explanation of how this may inform a critical reconsideration of the epistemic bases that undergird the modern/colonial world system.

The Critique of Secularism by Talal Asad as a Chance to Look for New Ways of Proclamation

In democratic societies, it is taken for granted to withdraw religiosity from public life. In this paper, we point to Talal Asad’s critique of this taken-for-grantedness. Using his genealogical method, he attempts to find the origin of this relegation of religiosity to the private sphere. The concept of secularity, he argues, is primarily an expression of the power of those who insist on enlightened reason. At the same time, secularism becomes, in a sense, a new religion, the only one acceptable in a democratic society. While we point out the causes of the secularization process, we also point out the aspects that are problematic in such a conception of religion. The Church’s response must take into account the process of secularization, but it must not fall into the same logic that led to this process in the first place. We point out the danger that the separation between the sacred and the profane, the physical and the spiritual, is increasing even in the new religious movements. We therefore propose a form of proclamation that involves the whole person and addresses him or her in everyday life.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Kritik Islam atas Sekularism Lingkungan

This article aims to understand Islam's critique of environmental secularism using the thoughts of Seyyed Hussein Nasr. This research is based on qualitative methods with library research. The purpose of using this type of research is to be able to more easily map the topic under study based on literature sources. The main argument in this article is that the presence of the secularism paradigm in the modern era not only creates a spiritual crisis, but also an ecological crisis. Islam with the teachings of moral wisdom contained in the Koran makes a value to minimize environmental damage. The results of the research show that the environmental crisis is an urgent problem for the whole world, including Indonesia. The presence of the modern era with its secular paradigm gave birth to an understanding of the environment that has no sacred value and is only an object of domination for humans. With this understanding there are various environmental crises such as deforestation, plastic waste, air pollution, excessive land use by investors and polluted water. So that it is necessary to build awareness of metaphysical understanding that humans and the environment (universe) are one unit.

Magic, Idleness and Comedy: Late Agamben’s Marxist Reaction to Neoliberal Political Theology

ABSTRACT This article deals with Giorgio Agamben's late work, arguing that Agamben’s trans secular critique of capitalist political theology is incepted from the historical conditions of late neoliberalism – with its focus on the personal “self” as its anchor. It suggests that to understand Agamben’s trans secular reaction to late neoliberalism we need historicized his thought. As historicized, it can reveal the dialectical limits of neoliberalism. To do so, the article reads late Agamben texts next to contemporary Marxist thinkers Alenka Zupančič and her theory of comedy, Todd McGowan and his analysis of Capitalism and desire and Sianne Ngai and her conceptualization of zaniness as the aesthetic representation of neoliberal precariousness. Moving on, the article focuses on Agamben’s late book Pulcinella. It argues that the book not only expresses the limits of neoliberalism but also uncovers hope and promises for comic theological renewal beyond neoliberalism and its cult of the self.

Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

Natural Law with and without God

There is a common perception of natural law theory as characteristically (if not necessarily) theistic. This is sometimes presented as a drawback by secular critics of natural law thinking. Natural law authors themselves differ on the role of theism within their theories. Some have argued that natural law theory presupposes theism, while others have sought to give their views a secular basis. This article explores the relationship between natural law theory and theism. I begin by defining the characteristic features of the natural law outlook. I show that these core aspects of natural law thought can be rendered consistent with both theistic and non-theistic worldviews. However, these worldviews may yield different responses to some fundamental questions about natural law, such as where natural law comes from; how (and to what extent) humans can know about natural law; why humans should follow natural law; and whether natural law changes. I explore the consequences for natural law theories of theistic and non-theistic answers to these questions. I then offer some reasons for thinking that a version of theism incorporating what I term ‘qualified teleological perfectionism’ provides the most coherent foundation for the natural law outlook.

Turning the Theological Turn on Its Head—The Levinasian Secularization of Heidegger’s Theology

In this article, I attempt to contribute to further the understanding of what has happened with the so-called ‘theological turn in French phenomenology’ through juxtaposing two sets of discourses: the theological in Heidegger and the secular in Levinas. While Levinas was identified by Janicaud as the first mover in the theological turn, much attention has recently been given to the theological themes in Heidegger’s writings. Less attention has been given, however, to the way in which Levinas’ philosophical and Talmudic writings often seek to be a secular critique of Heidegger’s philosophy. Through showing how a Levinasian secularization of Heidegger’s theology can make sense, I hope to shake up the debate surrounding the theological turn by placing it on its head.

Cheat Sheet for Political Secularism and Secular Studies

Abstract Jacques Berlinerblau, author of Secularism: The Basics, responds to his nine critics in this edition of the Journal of Secular Studies. He focuses on definitional issues and what he calls the POMOFOCO school and its critique of secularism.

Debating secularism: A liberal cosmopolitan perspective.

In the classical notion of secularism, privatization of religion is an essential component of freedom and equality between citizens, so that rights are granted to individuals rather than to communities. The currently dominant objections to this notion in the literature are the multiculturalist thesis, primarily expounded by Tariq Modood, and the critique of secularism through the "genealogical" method, associated with Talal Asad and his followers. This article critically assesses these objections and defends the classical notion of secularism from a liberal cosmopolitan perspective. The argument that the classical notion perfectly addresses the questions of freedom of conscience and diversity of belief is further supported by reference to an ignored source, Thomas More's Utopia.

The Role of the Arab "Intellectual" and Power Relations in the Translation of Aid ila Haifa and Rabi' Harr

As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first century, counter discourses emerged to challenge orientalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, capitalism, and globalization in cultural studies. Frequently bound up with culture and politics, the Arab “intellectual” effectively criticizes issues important to the Arab world. Drawing on this viewpoint, this paper examines the intellectual’s social and political role in Ghassan Kanafani’s Aid ila Haifa, translated into English as Returning to Haifa (2000) by Karen Riley, and Sahar Khalifeh’s Rabi' Harr, translated into English as The End of Spring (2008) by Paula Haydar. Edward Said’s ideas about the “intellectual”, “secular criticism”, “origins and beginnings” are the framework used to understand the intellectual’s role in writing-as-action and calling for necessary change. Whenever there is intellectuality, there are power relations entrenched in language. Insofar as the two Arabic originals are read in translation as well, and due to the rise of the cultural turn in translation studies, this paper, correspondingly, considers choices/contributions made by the translators that serve to align the “intellectual” with his/her orientation in the English versions, thus actively exercising a sort of language power that responds to the dominant discourse. The paper reveals that foreignization in the form of literalness, hybridity, and cultural mediation serve the “intellectual” in the translation culture. Keywords: The Intellectual, Origin and Beginning, Secular Criticism, Cultural Turn in Translation, Power Relations in Translation.

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris by Jennifer Walker (review)

Reviewed by: Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris by Jennifer Walker Joseph F. Byrnes Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris. By Jennifer Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. x, 355. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-757805-6.) Paris was the setting for compositions and performances of religious (and here read Catholic) music in secular venues. Jennifer Walker offers as her first example a performance of the mystery play Sainte-Genviève de Paris in the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir on January 6, 1893. For Walker, the history of such performances is, in effect, a history of Church-State interchange, yea even reconciliation. She narrates the rich and varied musical history of a secularized Catholicism, which presumably gives the lie to the old standard notion of "two Frances"—a Church and State in mutual opposition. Musical notation is integral to the analysis of religious music throughout the book, which is a volume in a remarkable series of studies labelled "AMS Studies in Music," a joint effort of the American Musicological Society and the Oxford University Press. Footnotes include a wide and detailed range of references, with the French texts translated by the author expanded to include preceding and following sentences. Too extensive to be read in full—they almost created an overweight metanarrative—these notes can serve for subsequent use by researchers. In "The Catholic Church in Republican Musical Aesthetics," Walker introduces both the Catholic in-house churchmen and musicologists who tried to define "sacred" music and the secular critics who, surprisingly, even more severely limited the texts, melodies, and harmonies that deserved the label of "sacred music." At the center of such discussions figured the works of Dubois, Fauré, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Widor. The centerpiece of the next chapter, "Pious Puppets and the Limits of Symbolism," is the puppetry of the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette, wherein the musical narratives were almost exclusively Catholic, to wit, Tobie (Tobias) and Noël, ou le Mystère de la nativité. Reporters and critics provided detailed presentations of story and musical line. In "Sincerity and the Limits of Symbolism," the author juxtaposes the Petit-Théâtre's offering of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile to [End Page 415] the Théâtre de Vaudeville's Les Drames sacrés to show again how critics, believers, and non-believers alike demanded text fidelity and musical seriousness. In chapters four and five, Walker trains a much more wide-angle lens on the series of concerts at the Church of Sainte-Eustache, "The Republic's Sacred Cathedral," and at the Trocadéro, "The Republic's Secular Cathedral." The Sainte-Eustache oratorio performances were religious in musical content but were problematically tied to the government's control of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Handel's Messiah, Berlioz's Requiem, Gounod's Mors et Vita, Wagner's La Cène des Apôtres, Massenet`s La Terre promise, and Bach's Saint Matthew Passion constituted the series, the use of Sainte-Eustache as a "theater" disturbing Cardinal François Richard and pleasing secular critics. Walker calls the ensemble a "Repertoire for the Republic." She details here the subtleties of the story lines, the mechanics of the musical lines, their place within each composer's total oeuvre, and the usually favorable critical response, concluding, "Much to the Church's chagrin, the church of Saint-Eustache thus became a key site in dismantling the polarizing dichotomy between Church and State" (p. 191). At the Trocadéro and the Champ de Mars, the 1900 Exposition Universelle featured displays of Catholic art, literature, and music. Cardinal Richard was absent from the opening liturgical celebration, but in his place Father Stéphen Coubé preached reconciliation with the Republic, pointing out that work, science, and art could be sanctified and given moral force by the Church. For all this to take place in 1900, ideologies had shifted in the preceding ten years, according to Walker, although, in fact, featured composers and works in 1889 (the Fair commemorating the 1789 Revolution) and 1900 overlapped considerably in their story, musical lines, and critics' responses. Brand...

By Scripture and Plain Reason: A historical retrieval of the relationship between faith and reason to better engage with present-day secularism

The formal principle of the Reformation, sola Scriptura, has sometimes been thought to imply that the Reformed minister and church member need not concern themselves with the use of reason and philosophy in matters of faith and theology. This misconstrued understanding of sola Scriptura led to a low regard for reason in matters of faith among Reformed folk. A low regard for reason, in turn, gave anti-intellectualism and fideism a foothold in local Reformed churches and left secularism and its progressive ideas unchallenged as it infiltrated the minds of Reformed church members, especially at churches in bigger cities and close to universities. This phenomenon can be addressed by establishing apologetics training platforms at local Reformed churches where church members can be trained to better defend the truth against secularism. To establish apologetics on a local church level, however, one must first retrieve the correct role of reason in matters of faith. This article accordingly embarked on an historical retrieval within the broad Reformed tradition. Different Reformers and subsequent Reformed theologians were examined to retrieve the proper relationship between faith and reason. This was accompanied by a focus on other relevant themes such as the concept of common notions and the three acts of the intellect. Through an historical retrieval, this article consulted the primary sources of figures in the Reformed tradition spanning from the early 1500s to the early 1700s. Additionally, modern interpreters of these figures have also been introduced for their insights. It became evident that reason plays a ministerial role in matters of faith. Moreover, the concept of common notions establishes a grounding for the undeniable role of reason in dialogues with secularism. By introducing the three acts of the intellect, the discussion also moved on to function as a critique of mainstream secularism, as it pertains to its disordered approach to reality in the form of expressive individualism. Although this article is the first of two in a series, it nevertheless accomplished its own end to emphasise the need for apologetics on a local church level and to retrieve the role of reason in matters of faith.Contribution: As a historical retrieval within the Reformed tradition, this article fits perfectly within the scope of In the Skriflig. It reminds the Reformed minister of the rich heritage within the Reformed tradition regarding the relationship between faith and reason, and brings it to bear on the challenge of secularism.

A case for religious criticism

ABSTRACT This essay returns to Edward Said’s juxtaposition of secular and religious criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to ask what benefits, if any, religious criticism might offer to the study of literature and culture in the twenty first century. Secular and religious, in Said’s catachrestic usage, do not describe specific traditions or historical structures of feeling or any particular set of orthodoxies; rather, they describe distinct thinking practices. The key difference is that religious criticism, in practice, stands on an appeal to some set of foundational principles, while secular criticism does not make any such stand. Looking at examples of criticism with religious valences in the works of Fredric Jameson and Hortense Spillers, the essay argues that religious criticism’s inherent commitment to collectivity and morality place it in necessary dialectical tension with secular criticism and thus render it integral to the work of critique as practiced by scholars of literature and culture today.

Religious Distinctions

Abstract This essay works to clarify Edward Said’s writings on religion, criticism, and the secular, arguing that this clarification has serious implications not only for Said’s project of “secular criticism” but also for understanding the workings of what he called the “critical consciousness” within a “purely secular view of reality.” The essay holds that there are not one but two concepts of the religious operative in Said’s work and maintains that most commentators on Said have ignored the second concept and have therefore misconstrued secular criticism’s relationship to what it nominates as religious. By reexamining Said’s writings on religion, criticism, and the secular, as well as his early studies of modern literature, this essay contends that a secular criticism aware of its commitment to both concepts of the religious allows for a more nuanced and powerful account of the manner in which such criticism can call itself secular. It suggests, furthermore, that this account not only clarifies the workings of Said’s own critical consciousness but also provides a likewise more nuanced view of the “method” or “rationality” such a consciousness deploys in making sense of human life, ingenuity, and history.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt

Reviewed by: Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt Anna Elena Torres Saul Noam Zaritt. Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. A Yiddish speaker recently recounted exactly where he was on the night in 1978 when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize: at a pub in the Bronx, watching a fistfight erupt between Bashevis's proud devotees and the disgruntled supporters of Chaim Grade, who considered him to be the more Nobel-worthy writer. These Yiddish readers took a more pugnacious approach to settling the questions posed in Saul Noam Zaritt's monograph Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody: Who should become the [End Page 462] literary representative of Yiddish in English, and who will decide? Does English translation permit more than one breakout Yiddish star? Zaritt examines the reception history, translational process, vernacularity, and "institutional ambitions" of Yiddish literature in the United States, asking: "What does it mean to write for the world and not just the global market? What world, whose world?" (9). Bashevis's Nobel Prize, then, signified a moment of dignified recognition for Yiddish on the stage of the "world" even as it sparked fights in the "vernacular" space of the bar. Jewish American Writing and World Literature aims to bring together analysis from the fields of Yiddish studies, American studies, and translation studies. Zaritt defines his key term vernacularity as "the condition of a localized language practice that is ethnically or racially inflected under an imperial gaze" (3). Zaritt's project concerns institutional and market frames, rather than internationalist, transnational, mobile, or diasporic models. He adds the Jewish words oylem, olam, and velt to discourses of "world" literature, with each term offering a different shade of communality. Absent from this corpus of vocabulary of "the world" are such concepts as tsiber or publikum, "community" or "public," which might hail ideals of social solidarity (the approach taken by Amelia Glaser's "passwords" in Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, 2020). Zaritt's protagonists are the scandalous novelist and playwright Sholem Asch; the modernist poet and critic Jacob Glatstein; and Nobel awardees Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The broad title "Jewish American Writing" belies its narrow demographic: all four of Zaritt's subjects are Ashkenazic men who lived for significant periods in New York City around mid-century. Zaritt describes their careers as "self-serving," departing from earlier proletarian generations' ideals of writing for "the masses." He argues, "In defining translation as both fantasy and failure, I contend that no figure in this book finds a homecoming in the world, in the US, or in any Jewish community" (22). Yet any subjects of comparison remain unnamed: What twentieth-century writer became "at home" in this world? Zaritt compellingly takes up questions of the temporality of translation and adaptation throughout. The first chapter, "A Monolingual World Literature: Sholem Asch and the Institutionalization of Yiddish Literature," discusses Asch's varied use of the ẓaddik figure as a signifier of Jewish history: "In searching for a usable past to counteract the crises of modernity, writers turned to the ecstatic religious experience of the zaddik either as a secular critique of religious life or as a counterpoint to the disappointments of Enlightenment rationalism" (56). The third chapter, "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Translation, and Ghost World Literature," examines the "hauntology" of his prose: "As a literature of and for ghosts, Bashevis's work of the 1940s celebrates its vernacular marginality while refusing to imagine any future for Yiddish culture" (106). The fourth chapter, "Between Heaven and Earth: Saul Bellow and the Dialectics of World Literature," posits: "Bellow's literary style translates and aestheticizes the language of an immigrant past to produce a new American English that balances descent into the vernacular with a reach for sublime metaphor" (130). Taken together, these sections thematize the processes of translation, folk adaptation, popular reception, and market circulation. The second chapter, "A World Literature To-Come: Jacob Glatstein's Vernacular Modernism," is the book's center. Zaritt maps the rich...

Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary

Reviewed by: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary Hannah Scheidt Charles McCrary, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022) A recently-published report from the Pew Research Center relates that two-thirds of US adults doubt the sincerity of religious objections to COVID-19 vaccine mandates. In other words, a healthy majority of Americans believe that people who refuse COVID vaccination for religious reasons are simply using religion as an excuse, and that the true basis of their objection lies in some source not as protected or sacrosanct as religious belief. Charles McCrary's Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers undertakes an overdue examination of the figure at the center of this and similar debates: the "sincere believer." As McCrary explains, starting in the 1940s, courts have evaluated petitions for religious freedom according to the "sincerity test," putting aside the question of whether or not a belief is true and asking instead if the claimant believes "sincerely." But what does it mean to be sincere when it comes to religious belief? Who gets to determine sincerity, and by what standards? McCrary homes in on this ubiquitous but contentious construction in a collection of historical case studies and cultural analyses, showing how sincerity operates as an important element in the legal construction of religion as a disciplinary category. McCrary suggests that the story of sincerity, in the context of free exercise jurisprudence, is a story about secularism. Sincerity is a key component in the [End Page 122] "secular metalanguage" by which judges and other authorities determine what passes as (good, true) religious belief and, therefore, what beliefs and behaviors are protected by law (12). Ultimately, McCrary suggests, sincerity is a linguistic and conceptual tool for a historically white Protestant regime to determine what is legible and acceptable as religion. Thus, this work contributes to a growing body of scholarship that critiques the secular regime, bringing to light its histories, strategies, and injustices. As McCrary explains, we come to know the sincere believer through her "others." The sincere believer has two essential foils: the knave and the fool. The knave is duplicitous, knowingly deceptive, and does not herself hold sincere religious beliefs but peddles religion for personal gain. On the other hand, the fool lacks the agency to hold sincere belief—his belief is not really his own. McCrary writes: "The knave is not authentically religious, because he is duplicitous and insincere. The fool is not authentically secular, for his insufficiently buffered self is irrational and credulous" (47). This constellation of characters—the sincere believer, the knave, and the fool—says a lot about how religion is imagined in a secular world, and McCrary's explanation of these types is clear and compelling. Truly, this trio is a valuable tool through which to understand (and to teach) about the disciplining of selfhood in the modern world. These types teach us about the characteristics and boundaries of proper, Protestant-ish, religion: belief-centric, individual, private. But alongside—or, rather, co-constituting—this understanding of religion is a belief in secularism and a concept of the proper secular subject: one who is truthful, agentic, and buffered. Thus, to freely exercise religion in the United States, McCrary shows, one must be properly religious and properly secular. He illustrates this dynamic through a critical telling of Frank Africa's 1981 case, in which Africa requested dietary accommodation in prison in accordance with his belief in the principles outlined by MOVE (a mostly Black group following the teachings of John Africa). The court's denial of Africa's request for accommodation—by essentially denying MOVE the status of religion—shows how, according to McCrary, "the Protestant secular is enmeshed in whiteness" (234). This narrative is one of the greatest contributions of Sincerely Held, illustrating the co-constitution of religion, secularism, and race through the modern politics of sincerity. To understand how right (proper, acceptable) religion is about race, McCrary argues, we must also see how right secularism is about race as well. One wonders where we go from here. McCrary's assertion that "what comes after the critique of secularism … is more critique of secularism" is...

Religion and Its Public Critics

To have the right and possibility to criticize religions in public life is crucial for developing a healthy liberal democratic society. However, this criticism could take many different forms with respect to who offers the criticism, on what grounds it is based, its aim, what the target of the criticism is, and whom the critics try to convince. In this article, I develop a theoretical framework we can use to distinguish and assess different forms of criticism, focusing primarily on secular criticism of religion. Furthermore, I argue that in performing such a meta-study of criticism, it is vital that we reflect more carefully on how to develop plausible ethics of criticism. Finally, by comparing public criticism and academic criticism, I show that such ethics must be developed in a way that is sensitive to discourse.

Secularism and the Muslim Women Question: A Critique of Secularism as a Frame of Reference for Gender Equality

The study of the theories of secularization has been marked by extensive debates about the shortfalls of religion and its inability to keep up with theories of gender equality. In these debates, considerably less attention has been given to the theoretical premises associating secularism with gender equality and the implications of their interrelation. The present paper seeks to undertake a re-examination of secularism as an emancipatory frame of reference for women, particularly but not exclusively Muslim ones, by exploring the concept within its complex and changing contexts and in light of recent feminist critiques of its narrative. It also aims to investigate the problematic positionality of Muslim women in the secular discourse as a way of shedding more light on the limitations and ideological contradictions of the premised interdependence between secularism and gender equality. The paper proposes that more effort needs to be made to recasting the secular narrative on gender equality and the place of Muslim women within it. Consequently, it seeks to bring more scholarly attention to the gender dimensions of secularism and its renewed significance as a political, social, and cultural force that impacts Muslim women’s lives in the West and Muslim majority societies as well.