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Abstract
Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism surveys the ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church has negotiated its relationship with the secular state, with other religions, and with Western modernity from its beginnings until the present. It applies multiple theoretical perspectives and draws on different disciplinary approaches to explain the varied and at times contradictory facets of Russian Orthodoxy as a state church or as a critic of the state, as a lived religion or as a civil religion controlled by the state, as a source of dissidence during Communism or as a reservoir of anti-Western, anti-modernist ideas that celebrate the uniqueness and superiority of the Russian nation. Kristina Stoeckl argues that, three decades after the fall of Communism, the period of post-Soviet transition is over for Russian Orthodoxy and that the Moscow Patriarchate has settled on its role as national church and provider of a new civil religion of traditional values.

Does liberal democracy require a strict separation between state and religion? In Anglophone liberal political theory, the separationist model of the First Amendment of the US Constitution has provided the basic template for the rightful relationship between state and religion. Yet this model is ill-suited to the evaluation of the secular achievements of most states, including India. This article sets out a new framework, minimal secularism, as a transnational framework of normative comparison. Minimal secularism does not single out religion as special, and it appeals to abstract liberal democratic ideals such as equal inclusion and personal liberty. Actual debates about secularism in India are shown to revolve around these ideals. The study of recent Indian controversies—about the Uniform Civil Code, the status of Muslims, and the rise of BJP nationalism—also sheds light on some blind spots of Western secularism and the conception of sovereignty and religion it relies on.

Liberal regimes in the West are not homogeneous in their application of secular principles. What kind of “secular” state a particular government promotes depends in large part on the strength and influence of the majority religion in that region. This article acknowledges the heuristic value of a recent threefold taxonomy of secularism: passive, assertive, and benevolent forms of secularism. I take issue with and challenge certain institutional privileges granted to the majority religion in one benevolently secular regime, the Republic of Ireland. I consider how benevolent secularism, while remaining benevolent toward religion, can align its application of secularism in the arena of publicly-funded education (primary and secondary education). A politically liberal regime, defined by the idea of public reason, invokes the principle of publicity, namely, that discourse and public policy be intelligible (and acceptable to a large degree) not only to an individual’s religious or moral community but also to the broader collection of members who constitute a liberal state. Drawing on John Rawls’ conception of public reason, and using Ireland as a case study, I show how this particular state-religion interrelation can be recalibrated in order to increase the prospects of reconciliation with a secular space of public reason.

Abstract
The article deals with issues related to the phenomena of secularization and secularism in the Free State of Bavaria. The analysis includes changes in attitudes towards religion in recent years, the perception of church institutions and the transformation of religiousness, and the partial disappearance of religiousness and the effects of multiculturalism in the context of the attachment to tradition and the strong cultivation of the Bavarian cultural identity.

Abstract
This article offers an interpretation of late modern social imaginaries and their relationship to religion and violence. I hypothesize that the transition from the 'secular age' to a so-called 'post-secular constellation' calls on us to critically reconsider the modern trope that all too unambiguously ties religion and violence together. Discussing the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control today on various fronts, I argue that the narrative semantics of the so-called 'return of religion' is frequently adopted as an imaginative catalyst for confronting these contemporary discontents – for better and worse. In linking recent work on 'social imaginaries' with Paul Ricœur's discussion of the productive role of imagination in social life, I then explore the transformative potential of religious imagination in its inherent ambiguity. In conclusion I demonstrate that this quality involves a poietic license to start all over, one which can be used to expose both the violence of our beloved political ideals of freedom and sovereignty, as well as their repercussions on religious practice.