Notes

1. Pecora argues that the opposite is also true; the ideal of secularism is incoherent, he writes, because we have not attended sufficiently to the history of secularization.

2. For an elegant extension of this idea see Brown. Among his many salient points: "however tempting it is to depict (that is, to transcode) the religiosity of resistance, insurgence, and attack as the sacralization of proper (economic) politics, that depiction cannot escape from becoming a parochial account that depends on an a priori distinction between religion and politics and on the separation of church and state" (747).

3. Casanova 5. For related claims see the essays in Berger.

4. For contrasting assessments, see Stark and Bruce. A less polemical account can be found in Hadden.

5. For this claim see Smith. See also Pecora, Secularization, and Berger, Desecularization.

6. On mediatization and religion see de Vries.

7. Armstrong herself is quite clear that she views religion as a cultural expression of an underlying, cross-cultural truth: "The religious experience of humanity has been remarkably unanimous. And that I find very endorsing, because instead of seeing your own tradition as one lonely little quest, idosyncratically crying in the darkness, you can see it as part of a giant, human search for meaning and value in a flawed and tragic world" (Lamb). This universalist thrust remains on display in Armstrong's most recent book, The Great Transformation (2006), a study of the Axial Age. The publisher's blurb calls the book "[a] revelation of humankind's early shared imperatives, yearnings and inspired solutions" (Random House).

8. See also Asad's critique of Taylor, pp. 2-8.

9. It is important to note that Asad, Mahmood, and Connolly write as non-theists and self-identified members of the cultural left. Their various critiques of secularism, then, link up intriguingly with explicitly religious critiques of secularism, such as those offered by the so-called Radical Orthodox theologians.

10. For an attempt to bring Hamilton and Connolly together, see Jager.

11. I do not mean to imply that either volume speaks in a single voice. Indeed, both speak in multiple voices; that is their point. I am calling attention, rather, to a significant tonal distinction between the volumes.

12. One might wonder, however, why "modernity" needs to be defined so narrowly. An appeal to "multiple modernities" might have made more sense here.

13. See "On Rooted Cosmopolitanism," Domna C. Stanton's 2005 Presidential Adress to the MLA: "I join those who would exclude religious transnationalism-Christian, Jewish, or Islamic-from cosmopolitanism, which, in my view, should strive to be secular and nondogmatic, provisional and subject to revision" (632). For a similar, though more nuanced, claim that religion and globalization are fundamentally at odds, see Derrida.

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