Joseph Blankholm’s colloquium talk has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule for Spring or Fall 2020.
Being secular means not being religious, but it also means participating in a religion-like tradition. This paradox shapes the everyday lives of secular people, as well as institutions that depend on categories like secular, spiritual, religious, and superstitious. Relying on years of ethnographic research among very secular people, this lecture describes four ways of producing the secular by purifying it of religious pollution. This approach shows how secular people become less religious and how religion and spirituality can be transformed and enabled to circulate in spaces that would otherwise prohibit them.
Joseph Blankholm is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and interdisciplinary research focus primarily on American religion, secularism, and secular people. Most recently, he has published on Karl Marx’s forgotten secularism, Saba Mahmood’s contribution to the study of religion, and the contradictory ways in which American law understands nonbelievers. He is currently finishing a manuscript on secular people’s religious ambivalence.
Date/Time
March 4, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public
Venue/Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz