The Immanent Frame: Governing religion with one eye closed
Everyone in China knows that official religious policy has only a nominal relationship to religious practice. The complaint comes from temple managers who are unable to register their temples, from...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Doing “Religion Work” in China?
When one thinks of politics and religion in China, one often imagines the state as an omnipotent power, invincible and all encompassing, exerting direct control over the lives of millions of religious...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Beyond supersessionist stories?
Brad Gregory’s monumental and erudite book has yielded a wide range of reactions. Highly appreciative remarks (especially from the Catholic side) are countered by rather dismissive, sometimes even...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Odd to each other
Cross-posted at Reverberations, a digital forum produced by the Social Science Research Council in conjunction with New Directions in the Study of Prayer.—ed. It is a distinct honor when someone as...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Stand still and watch
How will the relationship between the state and religion in China evolve in the next decade, presumably under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping? To make...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: History without hermeneutics: Brad Gregory’s unintended...
I would like to draw attention to three aspects of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, a book whose courage and ambition I applaud, if for no other reason than that it exemplifies what an...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Gazing into the future
The efflorescence of religious life in China over the past thirty-some years has been truly amazing. In the rural areas and small towns of Wenzhou, on the country’s southeastern coast, where I have...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Vinyl prayers
Cross-posted at Reverberations, a digital forum produced by the Social Science Research Council in conjunction with New Directions in the Study of Prayer, where this serves as the curatorial...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Chinese religions in comparative historical perspective
This short essay draws up the principal ideas from a chapter in my forthcoming book concerning the historical field of Chinese religions in comparative context in order to identify its distinctive...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Beyond the Catholic-Protestant divide
The epigraph of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation comes from an essay that Jacques Maritain wrote for the Review of Politics in 1942 entitled “The End of Machiavellianism.” In it, Maritain...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: A Kingdom that no longer says Whatever
As a scholar working and living in the Netherlands, I apparently live in a state of affairs in which disinterested moral disorder reigns: “Whatever the particular country in which they happen to...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Modernity, enchantment, and Fictionalism
The stern visage of Max Weber looms over discussions of modernity and enchantment, as does the sunnier countenance of Charles Taylor. Perhaps they should be joined by the open faced, bluntly spoken,...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Genre, method, and assumptions
More than 60 reviews of The Unintended Reformation have appeared since January 2012, including forums in four journals (Historically Speaking, Church History, Catholic Historical Review, Pro...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Three approaches to the study of religion
Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? In this post, I briefly set out three distinct approaches to the study of religion: criticizing religion, upholding religion, and disaggregating...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Historical arguments and omissions
A number of the forum reviewers raise objections to various aspects of the historical arguments in The Unintended Reformation. Others criticize me for having neglected what they regard as important...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: The secular in non-Western societies
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the wider Islamist movement of which it is an instance, are in many ways a secular phenomenon. If we define “secularity” not only as the weakening of religious...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: The theology blind spot
I have always been puzzled by the fact that Charles Taylor starts his book A Secular Age with a long quote from Bede Griffith in order to describe a religious type of experience. It is the description...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Religion in European migration studies
In recent years, religion has come back to the research agenda of the European social sciences with full strength. Important authors such as José Casanova, Timothy A. Byrnes, and Peter J. Katzenstein...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: The Charter of Quebec Values
On November 7th, 2013, on the heels of a heated public debate about the role of religion in public life, the government of Quebec tabled its controversial Bill 60, “Charte affirmant les valeurs de...
View ArticleThe Immanent Frame: Beyond religio-secularism: Toward a political critique
On July 24, 2013, a “Letter to the Prime Minister of Turkey” was published as an ad in the British newspaper The Times. It was signed by an illustrious group that included showbiz celebrities, such as...
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