Secularism

Catalog description

We tend to think of the secular as an absence of sorts: the neutral emptiness that remains once religion is removed. In this course, we will explore how the secular is imagined, represented, and produced. Like religion, the secular requires and creates particular images, sensibilities, regulations, practices, and beliefs. Like religion, it also operates through the authorization of certain forms of knowledge and the refusal of other actions and ideas as impossible. In everyday language, “secular” can imply a host of meanings, including atheist, profane, rational, or modern. We will work to give greater specificity to the concepts of secularism, secularization, and the secular. We will also address the presumed secularity of scholarly critique. What kinds of assumptions undergird scholarly inquiry? How do these assumption limit the agents, practices, and connections deemed significant or plausible? Together, we will take up the task of articulating what it means to live in a “secular age”—a framework which, although often invisible or implicit, establishes and limits much of what we experience, expect, and encounter in our daily lives.