Post-secular Turn Research Articles

«Постсекулярное»: возобновление дискуссии

The article outlines the idea of “postsecularity,” which has already become traditional in certain areas of religious studies and sociology of religion. On the one hand, it is contested within other research areas, and on the other hand, has not led to the creation of a clear and consistent theory, although it has become very popular in public discussion. In defending his position, the author refers both to his own works on the topic and to a large corpus of texts that to one degree or another touch upon the “post-secular thesis”, including studies devoted to the concepts of “secular” and “religion” in the aspect of their rethinking in modern times. Secularism, understood as an ideology and quasi-religion, and its fate in the modern world are discussed. It is argued that classical European secularization has now ended due to the fact that secularism as a global civilizational project has failed not only in non-Western contexts, but also in zones of active secularization, which took place in European contexts, albeit in different forms – both the ghettoization of religion (in the European West), and the atheism of the entire society (as in countries where the socialist project was being implemented). The new post-secular situation is characterized as the return of religion/religiosity not only to the public sphere, but also to the Lebenswelt of individuals who actualize various forms of religiosity, including the so-called spirituality. Thus, contrary to the standard thesis about secularization, which assumes a decline in people’s religiosity, the modern world demonstrates its new forms, not necessarily associated with long, dominant religious traditions and organizations. The author believes that the concept of a “true believer” as the most conscious, informed and religiously active individual, which has become standard in the science of religion, should be discarded, given that religiosity manifests itself in a variety of forms, far from such rigoristic interpretations. The author’s final thought is that in the current situation, the modern European description (understanding) of religion can no longer be a prescription for religion, that is, a requirement addressed to it, which is one of the aspects of the “post-secular turn”.

Indonesian pesantren-affiliated higher education: universal Islamic values to develop locally engaged but globally oriented multilingual graduates

ABSTRACT Although Indonesian higher education institutions affiliated with pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools) have long been established and influenced the national education system, how these pesantren-affiliated higher education institutions (PaHEIs) may have contributed to the development of quality human resources in the predominantly Muslim country remains less known. This ethnography study explores the contribution of a PaHEI in Ponorogo, East Java, Indonesia, in preparing quality Indonesian human resources. Framed by ‘post-secular turn’ and universal Islamic values, document analysis, observations, and semi-structured interviews with top university management, faculty members, and students reveal how this institution has combined knowledge production and universal Islamic values to negotiate the negative stereotype of religious institutions by strategically merging secular and religious competencies as a complimentary dialogue to nurture multilingual and open-minded graduates with global orientation whilst intensively engaged in community volunteerism. The study uncovers some philosophical values and practices of pesantren in preparing quality human resources.

Towards a Postsecular Shia Rhetoric – the Discursive Strategies of Transnational Online Network of Shia Muslims in India

Abstract Much of the scholarly discussions on the nexus between secular worldview and discourse on Islam have depicted a rather homogeneous image of ‘postsecular Islam’ by overlooking the heterogeneity and changing nature of communications on Islam. In most cases, the postsecular rhetoric of minority sects in Islam, such as Shia Islam, is rarely mentioned. This study aims to offer a more empirical and context-oriented understanding of the emerging postsecular turn in the contemporary narratives of Shia Islam due to its encounter with secular ideologies, digital media, and popular culture. To do so, it examines dominant discursive features of a transnational Shia religious network – ‘Who is Hussain’. The analysis focuses on exploring new interpretations and representations of Shi’i messages online. Four main types of narrative features were found: a postsecular contextualization of Shi’i religious events, a secular call for action infused with Shi’i moral motivations, promoting postsecular humanitarian responses, and translating Shi’i religiosity into citizenry engagement. The language deployed by the Facebook page of this network to translate religious ideas denotes a high degree of malleability. This open hermeneutic margin, this study finds, allows the knowledge producers to develop a postsecular narrative of Shi’ism that has the potential to travel beyond the confines of religious boundaries by animating new debates internationally.

The peace of Westphalia and religion in the context of the evolution of public law in Europe

The article describes the consequences of the «post-secular turn» in social sciences, in particular, in the history of law and the theory of international relations as applied to the study of the Congress of Westphalia and the Peace Treaty of 1648. The author shows how new approaches in the international theory (from realism to constructivism and neorealism) contributed to the criticism of the «secular myth of Westphalia». The author considers new perspectives on the religious issue at the Westphalian Peace Congress in terms of the evolution of public law in Europe. Westphalia is seen as a set of religion ideas, which caused a revolution in the concept and practice of sovereignty and Westphalia as the last Christian Peace. The article discusses the role of the legal principles of religious freedom and the confessional truce of the XVII century in the formation of the Westphalian system of security guarantees in Europe. The changes in the role of the Pope in international law during and after the Westphalian negotiations and the consequences of the Treaty for protestant and catholic conditions are indicated. The study reveals how various Christian denominations participated (ideologically and politically) in the Westphalian negotiations, while discussing the «special case» of Orthodoxy, taking into account the diplomatic rapprochement of Moscow, Stockholm and Paris before the Westphalian Peace Congress.

Mapping Post-Secular Islamic Liberation Theology

This article argues that the post-secular turn is the new social analysis that shapes the politics of the impoverized2 in Islamic liberation theology. In this article, I suggest that, given the essentialism and determinism characterizing much of the contemporary studies of religion and secularism, a direct articulation of a post-secular approach from an Islamic liberation theology perspective is both inevitable and necessary. Such an approach can offer new meaning for both religion and secularism by engaging with the hegemony of secularism in relation to the state and society to envision a politics of the impoverized.

Kabbalah, "Dybbuks", and the Religious Posthuman in the Shakespearean Worlds of "Twin Peaks"

In the series Twin Peaks, Mark Frost, David Lynch and others create a mythological framework structured by and filtered through Shakespeare in a postsecular exploration of the posthuman. Twin Peaks exemplifies a cultural postsecular turn in its treatment of the posthuman, taking the religious and spiritual perspectives to new —and often extreme—heights in its use of Kabbalah and other traditions. Twin Peaks involves spiritual dimensions that tap into other planes of existence in which struggles between benign and destructive entities or forces, multiple universes, and extradimensional, nonhuman spirits question the centrality of the human and radically challenge traditional Western notions of being. Twin Peaks draws from Shakespeare’s expansive imagination to explore these dimensions of reality that include nonhuman entities—demons, angels, and other spirits—existing beyond and outside of fabricated, human-centered worlds, with the dybbuk functioning as the embodiment of the postsecular religious posthuman.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Теоретическая рамка для анализа постсекулярного мира (Рецензия на книги Д.А. Узланера «Конец религии? История теории секуляризации» и «Постсекулярный поворот. Как мыслить о религии в XXI веке»)

This review presents an analysis of two books by D.A. Uzlaner: "The End of Religion? The History of the Secularization Theory" (2019) and "Postsecular Turn. How to Think About Religion in the 21st Century" (2020), in which a successful attempt was made to delineate the field of modern discussions about the secular and post-secular world and the position of religious phenomena in modern society. In "The End of Religion? The History of the Secularization Theory" the author explores the prerequisites and formation of the theory of secularization. The structure of the chapters is based on the periodization, which includes the background, formation, criticism and renewal, crisis and decline of the theory of secularization. "Postsecular Turn. How to Think About Religion in the 21st Century" is not a historical research. It is an attempt to build a new theory of secularization, the need for which was justified in the first book. The cross-cutting theme of the book is the ratio of religious and nonreligious in the public space. The most notable in this monograph are the elaboration of various details of the optics of the description of the post-secular world and its origins, as well as an analysis of the current situation in Russia of the last decade. Due to the methodological balance and critical premise in the "Kantian" sense, the cartography of the religious and non-religious in the dilogy brings us closer to understanding of the contradictory Modern terrain. The author bases his analysis both on the classics of social thought and on the latest researchers. The proposed theoretical framework clarifies the specifics of religiosity and related phenomena in the current situation both in the global scale and in Russia.

The Postsecular Turn: Interrogating Postcolonialism after 9/11

Due to its complete reliance on western secular tradition, postcolonial theory has been accused of secular bias manifested in its negligence of spiritual and religious epistemologies. Having its methodological roots in forms of the secular – liberal humanism, Marxism, the western university – postcolonialism has largely ignored a spiritual dimension. Put differently, inspired and influenced by western ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism, postmodernism and secular humanism, as well as Edward Said’s concepts of secular criticism and the secular intellectual, postcolonialism has downplayed and rejected religion as a subject of concern in favour of secular thought, defining its intellectual and political project in opposition to the term “sacred”. However, owing to the global return of religion from “exile” (especially after the 9/11 attacks), postcolonial critics and theorists have started to engage with the question of religion and spirituality. They have recognized the significance of the religious and the spiritual as modes of postcolonial intervention. This essay attempts to highlight the postsecular turn within the field of postcolonial studies. My argument is that due to the contributions of non-western postcolonialists and their acknowledgement of religion as a postcolonial category of analysis, postcolonialism has become postsecular, furnishing a room for both the religious and the secular so that they may enter into an academic critical dialogue. This gradual process of change from a secular postcolonialism to a postsecular postcolonialism is reflected in postcolonial writers’ inclusion of spiritual and religious matters in their literary and theoretical narratives.

The Postsecular and Rethinking the Political

The notion of postsecularity has come to the fore in recognizing the neglected significance of religion and belief in terms of their normative, social and political contributions to the individual and collective lives of contemporary times. The literature of postsecularism, essentially, takes issue with the normative-political problematique of coexistence of diverse beliefs in the political community. In this respect, Jürgen Habermas joins the term of postsecular consciousness to be able to deal with the persistence of religiousity and faith in modernized societies and seeks ways to include religious reasoning and moral intuitions into the public sphere and will-formation of the political community. However, he ends up restricting religious moral and political contribution strictly to the general public sphere and ultimately civil society. This article argues that the inadequacy of his postsecular orientation has to do with his idea of the political, which ignores contestation and pluralization in relation to the very foundations of the political. The article also claims that the postsecular turn in political theory fulfills its promises, if it opens the relationship between the secular/immanence and the religious/ transcendence to diverse/plural interpretations, and simultaneously contest the political as ontology among subjects of diverse beliefs in the political community.

Which Axial Age, whose rituals? Habermas and Jaspers on the ‘spiritual’ situation of the present age

Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? An uncertainty arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence. Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event? In his most recent work, Habermas affirms the continuing importance of the contemporary access to the First Axial values, but before him Jaspers anticipates that a second cognitive revolution opens areas that may be receptive to new value foundations. Habermas’ justification of the postsecular turn may not be thinkable without Jaspers’ discovery of the postaxial imaginary.

A sociotechnical order for the umma: connecting Islam and technology in Suharto’s Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article explores narratives connecting Islam and technology that arose in Indonesia during the New Order period (1965–1998). These public discussions defined technological work, especially work in high technology, as a vital spiritual and economic arena for Indonesian Muslims. By asserting technology as a site for spiritual action, Indonesian Islamic activists offered a redefinition of economic development intended to alter both its goals and the character of participation in the development enterprise. In doing so, they framed technological activity as a crucial form of moral agency. Embracing the postsecular turn in historical scholarship which emphasizes attention to the ongoing social processes which define religiosity and secularity, this article investigates how religion and technology are entangled in contemporary Indonesia.

Where Public Theology and Public Administration Meet

Abstract Since 9/11 Jürgen Habermas has paid considerable attention to religion in the public sphere. He has described contemporary Western societies as ‘post-secular’, arguing that believers and non-believers should show a mutually cooperative attitude and engage in complementary learning processes. Although public theologians have urged for policies that would encourage such collaboration, public administration scholars and practitioners seem to have completely neglected this call. In this article we inquire into the possibility of a ‘post-secular public administration’, which grants a more significant place to beneficial forms of religion in modern societies. By presenting a case study on Street Pastors in the British night-time economy we offer an example of both a post-secular religious contribution to the public sphere, as envisaged by Habermas, and a piece of post-secular empirical social science research. Finally, we critically assess Habermas’ post-secular turn within the context of a cross-narrative between public theology and public administration.

Reinhold Niebuhr y el realismo agustiniano en Relaciones Internacionales: Hallazgos arqueológicos del giro postsecular en la disciplina

La influencia de las ideas religiosas en la Teoría de Relaciones Internacionales ha sido un tema poco explorado por la deriva secularista y cientificista de la disciplina. Sin embargo, bajo el giro postsecular, varios teóricos han empezado a problematizar los efectos político-normativos del paradigma de la secularización y a releer críticamente los orígenes y desarrollos de la teoría de Relaciones Internacionales. En este marco, el artículo estudia la influencia de san Agustín en los orígenes de la escuela realista. Analiza cuándo y cómo la obra agustiniana llegó al realismo clásico, a través de una relectura de los conceptos de naturaleza humana, historia y orden, formulados por el Obispo de Hipona en clave dialéctica. Asimismo, el artículo demuestra la influencia de estos conceptos agustinianos en la formulación del realismo esperanzado de Reinhold Niebuhr, reconocido como el padre de los realistas en Relaciones Internacionales.

The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

Adorno und Habermas im Vergleich: Vom Säkularismus zum Postsäkularismus?

Adorno and Habermas: From Secularism to Post-Secularim? The article analyses the 'post-secular turn' in critical theory by comparing Jürgen Habermas' late philosophy with the philosophy of his predecessor Theodor W. Adorno. It poses the question to what extent can Habermas be seen as a post-secular theorist when setting his work against that of Adorno? Following Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, the author develop a concept of post-secularism as a move beyond the strict division between religion and non-religion, and apply the concept to the work of the two critical theorists in question. Finally, Adorno’s work is identified as a 'religious secularism’ and Habermas’ work as a 'post-secular secularism’. Thus, the author points out the ambivalence, which the alleged 'post-secular turn’ breeds, and suggest a reconsideration of the religious motives discovered in Adorno’s work.

Multi-scaled secularization or postsecular present? Christianity and migrant workers in Shenzhen, China

This article provides a multi-scaled, grounded understanding of how secularization and re-sacralization occur simultaneously in a context of rapid modernization. Recent geographical scholarship in the geography of religion have exhibited deficient reflection over the geo-historical contingencies and complexities of secularization and secularity. This article seeks to re-conceptualize secularization as a multi-scaled, grounded and self-reflective process through an empirical study of the hybrid, contradictory processes of secularization and postsecular religious revival in a ‘gospel village’ in Shenzhen, China. In this rapidly urbanizing village, Christian belief inherited from Western missionary work has gradually lost its hold amidst modernization and urbanization. However, the inflow of rural migrant workers has re-invigorated the church. Christianity has created possibilities for postsecular ethics and resistances, enabling migrant workers to materially, symbolically and emotionally settle in a new socio-economic environment. Also, new situated religiosities arise as theological interpretations are used to negotiate and even legitimize social inequalities and alienation. This article therefore argues that the postsecular turn in human geography needs to consider how the postsecular articulates, and co-evolves with, secular conditions of being in the world. It highlights the hybrid and contested nature of the secularization process, which gives rise not only to disengaged belief and immanent consciousness but also to new aspirations for, and formations of, religiosities.

Women’s Circles and the Rise of the New Feminine: Reclaiming Sisterhood, Spirituality, and Wellbeing

This paper draws on the results of ethnographic research on ‘women’s circles’; women-only spaces that celebrate sisterhood and the ‘feminine’, including the increasingly globally popular ‘Red Tent’. Women’s circles are non-institutionalized, often monthly gatherings, for women to come together and relax, meditate, share stories, partake in rituals, heal, nourish, and empower themselves. Based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with founders and organizer-practitioners of women’s circles in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, the study shows how they offer a growing number of women from diverse backgrounds a space that they find lacking in secular-liberal society, out of a desire to ‘re/connect’ with each other, their bodies, their inner selves, and sometimes with the sacred. Women’s circles are indicative of women’s heightened participation in the realm of subjective wellbeing culture, including both elements of spirituality and more secular ‘personal growth’. Against the presumption that circles would be merely expressive of neo-liberal individualist consumer culture or retrograde gender essentialism, the paper argues they can be viewed as sites of sisterhood, solidarity, and dissent, cultivating a new type of femininity grounded in both affirmative and more oppositional forms of emerging feminist consciousness. In response to the so-called ‘post-secular turn in feminism’ and the growing interest for religion and, more recently, spirituality in (secular) feminist theory, the paper pleads for a re-consideration of the rise of women’s spirituality/wellbeing culture in the West as a form of post-secular agency.

The post-secular tourist: Re-thinking pilgrimage tourism

The coming of post-secular society has opened up interesting transdisciplinary research and perspectives. Research and academic debates on the post-secular have yet to make inroads into the discipline of tourism studies, which is ironic since there is an intrinsic religiosity to tourism. We table that tourism lies at the core of the post-secular turn and should be studied as such. Likewise, academic debate on post-secularism has not accorded tourism its proper due. This study has two objectives. First, to fill the research gap in studies of tourism and post-secularism and, second, to show that post-secular tourism is one of the key spaces where the post-secular is articulated. This article is based on interviews of pilgrims in the Galicia region (Spain) conducted in 2011, 2012 and 2014. Four major attributes of post-secular tourism were identified: (self-)reflexivity, quest for ontological security, heterodoxy and topos-disloyalty. Our findings indicate that the post-secular tourist transcends conventional dichotomies between religious pilgrimage and tourism, journeying as affirmation of denominational faith and pure leisure. Post-secular tourism is about ontogenesis, that is, it is performative rather than injunctive. It is in this sense that one can speak of post-secular tourism as something open, unfolding and in constant becoming.

Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam

Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism ( Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capitalist modernity. In contrast, in his last novel ( Submission, 2015) and interventions, Houellebecq makes a post-secular turn largely driven by the radicalization of positivist ideas relying on evolutionary biology. This turn is opposed to modernity and favourable to a reconsideration of Islam as the religion of submission and a remedy to personal crisis and Europe’s decline. I show that, evaluative differences notwithstanding, Houellebecq’s stereotyping of Islam has remained constant in his literary work.