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Abstract
McCaffree's challenge to traditional definitions of religion, and his suggestion that religiosity is about individual integration into a moral community are discussed. This is taken as an opportunity to examine difficulties in defining religion, and attempts to go around the definition issues by offering analogies. Religious emotion, as discussed by William James and Emile Durkheim, is found to be no different than strong emotions directed at our secular commitments. Devotion, and self-sacrifice are discussed in both religious and secular context. The denial of death and fantasies about an afterlife are central to religion, and are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment. Adapted from the source document.

This article situates the emergence of the Deoband movement, an Islamic revivalist movement based at India's Dar al-'Ulum Deoband madrasa (seminary), within concepts of colonial secularity in British India. It shows how the decline of first Mughal and then British patronage for Islamic learning, as well as the post-1857 British policy of non-interference in 'religious' matters, opened up a space for Deobandi scholars to re-conceive the madrasa as a 'religious' institution rather than one engaged in the production of civil servants, to reimagine the 'ulama' as stewards of public morality rather than professionals in the service of the state, and to reframe the knowledge they purveyed as 'religious' knowledge distinct from the 'useful' secular knowledge promoted by the British. The article treats this production of 'religious' knowledge and space as discourse of distinction similar to those explored elsewhere in this HSR Special Issue.

At the time of data analysis for this report there were 193 countries in the world. Various institutions – the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the CIA, the World Values Survey, Gallup, and many others – have performed sophisticated statistical analyses on cross-national data. The present investigation demonstrates that valid and reliable data concerning religiosity and secularity exist for most countries and that these data are comparable. Cross-national data relating to social, political, economic and cultural aspects of life were tested for correlation with religiosity/secularity. In contrast to the most widely accepted general account of secularity, the Existential Security Framework (ESF; Norris & Inglehart, 2004), secularity was not most highly related to material security, though these were highly related. Rather, secularity was most strongly related to the degree of formal education attained. Material security explained no significant variance beyond education. Thus, religion's primary function in the world today is being replaced, not so much by the pseudo-materialistic supplication for better living conditions as posited by the ESF, but by contemporary education – extensive knowledge of contemporary cultures, philosophy, modes of thought or processes of reasoning.

A great deal of attention has been given over the past several years to the question: What is secularism? In On Diaspora, Daniel Barber provides an intervention into this debate by arguing that a theory of secularism cannot be divorced from theories of religion, Christianity, and even being. Accordingly, Barber's argument ranges across matters proper to philosophy, religious studies, cultural studies, theology, and anthropology. It is able to do so in a coherent manner as a result of its overarching concern with the concept of diaspora. It is the concept of diaspora, Barber argues, that allows us to think in genuinely novel ways about the relationship between particularity and universality, and as a consequence about Christianity, religion, and secularism

The role of religion in the structure of European identity was not on the top of agenda before the discussion of the Constitution project, but in the light of the intensive migration and Brexit this question appears to be more and more important. The issue of the interconnection between religion and European identity has several dimensions: the role of believing and belonging as well as Christianity and it forms in construction and functioning of European identity and feeling of Europeanness. The correlation analysis of Eurobarometer data (2009-2019), European Value Study (2d and 3d waves) and World Value Survey (1st-6th waves) data allows us to prove that, being secular in its roots, European identity has intense ties with religiousness. Religion appears to be a factor of European identity not within any confession, but more as a faith. Nevertheless, correlation analysis also demonstrates differences in the influence of Christian confessions on the one's self-identification as European, which allows to look wider at the religion function in European Identity and claimed European values (mainly of secular and Enlightenment origin) in historical retrospective. This means that religion perspective not only reopens the discussion of the substance of being European, but also is one of key approaches to the urgent issues of peaceful group coexistence within European Union.