The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
March 2007
Secularism: Religious, Irreligious, and Areligious
By W. Clark
Gilpin
Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology
University of Chicago Divinity School
1 Harry S. Stout and Robert M. Taylor, Jr., “Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25.
2 The idea of keywords is borrowed, of course, from the fascinating work of Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967, 1969).
4 An important call for reconstruction of the secularization paradigm came from José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
5 Martin Riesebrodt, “Religion in Global Perspective,” in Global Religions: An Introduction, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95.
6 The citations in this paragraph come from Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2, 27; and Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32-34.
9 Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1965, 1966), 1-2.
10 Cox, 3-4, 52, 15, 18, 95. Unlike my own use of the term, Cox treated secularism as one of the “closed isms” that stands in opposition to the secular fulfillment of religious faith.
11 John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: Norton, 2003), 113, 115.
13 Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.
15 See, for example, Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
16 See, for example, R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies:Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
17 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 97.
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