The Sacrality of the Secular and Philosophy of Religion

“It’s possible,” says Professor Bradley Onishi, “to hold an enchanted secularity” if we stop thinking of secularism as mere rationalism. In this week’s podcast, we hear about the ways in which philosophy of religion has thought “with” religion rather than for or against religion. Tracing alternative models of secularity through Martin Heidegger, Geoges Bataille, and others, Onishi calls on us to rethink how the philosophy of religion can help religious studies find different ways to frame the categories of secular and religious. As a resource in the academy, he says, religions themselves provide ways to question our basic assumptions about what religion does for us and look at our normative assumptions about anew. Transcription forthcoming.