secularism Archives - Public Seminar

France’s Tale of Two Secularisms

After terrorist attacks rattle France, where will the Republic go from here?

November 18, 2020 • by Hannah Leffingwell

In October, France experienced another spate of terrorist attacks over a span of two weeks. First was the gruesome beheading of an Évreux public-school teacher, Samuel Paty, after he showed a caricature of the prophet Muhammad in his class. The slaying received national attention and the French government responded swiftly, ...

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I Was Primed for Sex & Secularism

Reflections on Joan Wallach Scott

November 5, 2018 • by Susan Henking

When I was young, I wanted to understand how one became secular. At first, I had no word for the change I sought. What I wanted– not so much to know as to do – was leave religion behind. I had been religious. I now was not. Getting there was ...

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Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

Critical Reflections in Lights of Peter Berger’s The Many Altars of Modernity

September 18, 2018 • by Jose Casanova

Given its association with the New School for Social Research, Public Seminar seems to me a fitting space for some critical reflections triggered by former NSSR faculty member Peter Berger’s last major work, The Many Altars of Modernity.[1] The book is significant in a dual sense. It recaptures the style and restates some ...

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Gender and the Politics of Secularism

A conversation between Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler on Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism

April 26, 2018 • by Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book Sex and Secularism can be found here. Judith Butler: Shall we start the interview? I am wondering whether you could describe the decision to work on a book on sex and secularism. What led up to that decision? How does this book follow from your The Politics ...

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Sex and Secularism

An excerpt from Joan Wallach Scott’s latest book

April 26, 2018 • by Joan Wallach Scott

An interview between Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott can be found here. As I have studied it here, secularism is not an objective description of institutions and policies but rather a polemical term whose meanings change in the different contexts in which it is deployed. In this book I have ...

Multi Media

Colin Kaepernick, Burkinis, and Crime at Walmart

Episode 49

September 7, 2016 • by Neil J. Young, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Nicole Hemmer

In this week's episode, Natalia, Neil, and Niki debate Colin Kaepernick's protest against the national anthem, France's burkini ban, and Walmart's high crime rate. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick remained seated during a recent pre-game national anthem in protest ...

Colin Kaepernick, Burkinis, and Crime at Walmart

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A Burkini Removed and Secularism Exposed

August 26, 2016 • by Marianne Le Nabat

France has apparently overturned its “burkini ban.” This happened after images surfaced of French police forcing a woman to undress on a beach. It’s worth pausing to consider what secularism even means at this point. Secularism, at the level of the state, means setting public institutions and laws on a universalist footing ...

A Burkini Removed and Secularism Exposed

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Two Cheers for Prayer Shaming

December 5, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

My mentor at Fordham, the late Quentin Lauer, S.J., who helped introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to an American audience and was a Hegel scholar par excellence, liked to tell a story about his boyhood in Brooklyn, where he would go swimming off the docks adjacent to Upper New York bay with ...