I’m co-hosting a symposium on Material Secularisms at Penn on February 27–29. I’ll be speaking on a panel about “Bodies” on Saturday morning, 2/29 at 10:00.

Conference description:

“Is secularism anything more than books on a shelf?”

The classic secularization narrative of the mid-20th century envisioned a progressive decline of religion as part of the advance of modernity. Charles Taylor has referred to this as the “subtraction story,” in which “religion” is a sort of artificial imposition that modifies a neutral intellectual-cultural landscape buried beneath the surface. But Talal Asad encourages us to think about “formations of the secular” as something more than just the emergence of universal reason. Secularism, in its many iterations across global history, is made, rather than found. This means that secularism, too, is embodied, felt, and the site of a full-fledged material culture, including objects, clothing, space, architecture, monuments, bodily practices, media, and more.

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