This book encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between the “secular” and the “religious” to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. It argues that the artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical “academic study of religion” and an ideological and authoritarian “religion” only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, the book calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of “encounter” and “response,” illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. The book arg ... More

This book encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between the “secular” and the “religious” to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. It argues that the artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical “academic study of religion” and an ideological and authoritarian “religion” only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, the book calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of “encounter” and “response,” illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. The book argues that the act of responding to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds. It recommends that scholars must confront the questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. The book refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings, as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources that religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. The book concludes that, in humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.