Secularism

Catalog description

Surveys the 21st-century debates over secularism and locates them within a longer history of advocacy and critique. Students learn to distinguish among the various meanings of secularism and the secular, such as the separation of church and state, a philosophy with a this-worldly focus, religion-making, and the absence of religion. Students also consider whether secularism should continue to be a logic of governance, or if the contemporary critique of secularism has rendered it obsolete.