The Sacred Is the Profane The Political Nature of "Religion" [Paperback]

The Sacred Is the Profanecollects nine essays written over several years by William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon that share a convergent perspective: not simply that both the category and concept religion is a construct, something that we cannot assume to be natural or universal, but also that the ability to think and act religiously is, quite specifically, a modern, political category in its origins and effects, the mere by-product of the modern state.

These collected essays, substantially rewritten for this volume, advance current scholarly debates on secularism-debates which, the authors argue, insufficiently theorize the sacred/secular, church/state, and private/public binaries by presupposing religion (often under the guise of such terms as religiosity, faith, or spirituality ) to historically precede the nation-state. The essays return, again and again, to the question of what religion --word and concept--accomplishes, now, for those who employ it, whether at the popular, political, or scholarly level. The focus here for two writers from seemingly different fields is on the efficacy, costs, and the tactical work carried out by dividing the world between religious and political, church and state, sacred and profane.

Sources
Introduction: On the Persistence of Imagining Religion
Chapter One: On the Definition of Religion
Chapter Two: Words, Words, Wordbooks, Or Everything Old is New Again
Chapter Three: Contemporary Reinventions of Religion: Disney and the Academy
Chapter Four: ''Just Follow the Money'': The Cold War, the Humanistic Study of Religion, and the Fallacy of Insufficient Cynicism
Chapter Five: Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture?
Chapter Six: Maps of Nothing in Particular: Religion as a Cross-Cultural Taxon?
Chapter Seven: ''They Licked the Platter Clean'': On the Co-Dependency of the Religious and the Secular
Chapter Eight: The Origins of Christianity Within, and l“