Talal Asad

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept.

The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation―from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign―is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes―for Westerners and non-Westerners alike―particular forms of "history making."… (más)

The book is a collection of previously published and new material that exposes the meaning of the secular and secularism. The author calls it "an anthropology of the secular." As it is very difficult to develop self-consciousness of one's own culture, the value of this book is that it pushes secular readers to do just that. There are challenges to self-understanding in this book that are well worth the price. The author makes secularists examine their assumptions about what constitutes a human being and the way of being human in a modern context. The book seems to be written for a scholarly audience and as such is loaded with jargon, convoluted sentences, and repetition that sometimes seem to obscure the authors ideas. The text would benefit from considerable editing.… (más)