Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism

Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between "secular" and "religious" to better understand the revival of political and public religion across the world. Roberts approaches the phenomenon as a process of "encounter" and "response," illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our worlds, confronting the questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing our beliefs and practices. He incorporates the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, who exemplify encounter and response by exposing secular thinking to religious thought and practice.