Secularism and Religion-Making [Paperback]

This book conceives of religion-making broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered religious are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion.

The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.

1. Introduction: Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Postsecular
Arvind Mandair, Markus Dressler

2. Imagining Religions in India: Colonialism and the Mapping of South Asian History and Culture
Richard King

3. Translations of Violence: Secularism and Religion-Making in the Discourses of Sikh Nationalism
Arvind Mandair

4. On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time
Ruth Mas

5. Secularism, Religious Violence, and the Liberal Imaginary
Brian Goldstone

6. The Politics of Spirituality: Liberalizing the Definition of Religion
Kerry Mitchell

7. Comparative Religion and the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian 'Mysticism' into Liberal Islamic Modernity
Rosemary Hicks

8. Apache Revelation: Making Indigenous Religion in the Legal Sphere
Greg Johnson

9. Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse: The l4