Social Science Research Council

We’ve put together a selection of recent highlights from here & there, The Immanent Frame’s regular roundup of perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere.

In response to the resurgence of aggressive, intolerant and even violent religious fundamentalism of recent decades, deep questions, often answered in the negative, have been raised about the place of religion in public life. Religion is often experienced and described as antithetical to public order, democracy, and progressive values. However, the example of religious environmentalism shows (once again) that religion in and of itself has no particular political identity—it is neither left nor right, democratic nor undemocratic. [...]

How did the same people who elected Barack Obama President last Tuesday vote to pass Proposition 8 in California, the state ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage? My liberal friends in Massachusetts and across the country are organizing protests and hanging their heads. “We expected more from California,” they mutter under their breath.

The 2008 election provides a significant occasion to rethink our assumptions about justice and politics—concepts we rarely link together, least of all during presidential campaigns and elections. [...]

Politics is not reducible to elections, of course. Yet these contests—particularly the quadrennial spectacle that is a Presidential race—usually conclude with opportunities for political reflection. Nowhere is this more evident than in the blogosphere, now crowded with academics’ reflections mere days following the tallying of votes. [...]

In conjunction with recent post-election reflections at The Immanent Frame by Howard Adelman, Arjun Appadurai, John Esposito, Conrad Hackett, D. Michael Lindsay, Elizabeth Prodromou and John Schmalzbauer, Nicole Greenfield gathers a selection of articles that consider the role religion played in last Tuesday’s election (and the way it might figure politically in the months ahead), while Ruth Braunstein surveys news and analysis on “Voting in a year when ‘Muslim’ was a slur.” Find both of these roundups (and more) at here & there.

In our ongoing discussions, Patrick Lee Miller continues his exchange with critics of his recent post on “Immanent Spirituality,” Arjun Appadurai responds to Jason Kuznicki’s criticisms of his post, “The magic ballot” (and Kuznicki fires back), Christine Wicker and Conrad Hackett consider how best to grasp the polling impact of “evangelicals,” and readers of Christianity Today and others react to D. Michael Lindsay’s post on evangelical leaders and the “Changing of the guard.”

Barack Obama’s victory needs to be recognized and celebrated—not simply recognized for the fact that he won, but recognized by understanding the meaning of his victory.

Americans have elected the most theologically astute president since Jimmy Carter.

In the Muslim world, as in Europe and much of the world, Obama is welcomed as an internationalist president.

I regret that we are forced to catch the special aura of this election without a deep and serious space for the idea of magic, magic as it used to be.