Talal Asad has conducted extensive research on the phenomenon of religion (and secularism), particularly the religious revival in the Middle East. Professor Asad is the author of Genealogies of ...

Declining religious belief and changes in the relationships between church and state have dramatically altered the European religious landscape over the past two hundred years. On November 16 Danièle ...

VATICAN CITY — Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s academic career has been crowned with numerous distinctions, to which was recently added the prestigious Ratzinger Prize, a sort of equivalent to ...

History occasionally produces events that overturn the intellectual frameworks used to interpret the modern world. The French Revolution did this in 1789 by demonstrating the political power of mass ...

Gregory Baum delivers the Nostra Aetate Lecture at Georgetown University in Washington Nov. 17. WASHINGTON-- Interreligious dialogue -- perhaps especially Catholic-Muslim dialogue -- must deal with ...

To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It doesn’t mean that we live in a society from which God has been expelled. I don’t think we ever will live in ...

This is the 20th part of a series on Christianity and the history of antisemitism. While we are often reminded to “Never forget,” many of us were never taught this history. As European society became ...

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk wouldn’t be a happy man today. He had led a revolutionary effort to transform a traditional Islāmic society into a confident modern state. Nearly a century after Atatürk, ...

That we seem to be merrily rolling along toward a fiscal cliff is evident. Why is not as clear — at least not the deep why. Some of the depth of the problem can be plumbed out if we look at the ...

This Friday marks the end of Turkey’s experiment with secular modernity. That’s when regular Islamic religious services begin at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. The 1,500-year-old structure had served as a ...

The Christian past shapes the secular present. Does it matter? By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist In early November, a study published in the journal Science claimed to trace the whole social course of ...