Please click here for news of our three latest events in April 2012!

How and why do people – politicians, academics, managers,teachers, journalists, clergy, lawyers – distinguish between “religious” and “non-religious” or “secular”? And what happens when they make such a distinction? It matters, after all, whether a museum exhibit is considered cultural or religious; a crucifix on a necklace is deemed an expression of faith, tradition or fashion; Western law is regarded as different in kind to shari’a law; a transaction is considered financial rather than religious; a particular state is held to be secular or not; a minority is viewed as religious or ethnic; and a PhD thesis is considered religious or just about religion. The network has grown out of a series of workshops and related events that have brought together scholars from religious studies, anthropology, history, theology, philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, economics and legal studies. Although scholars often take “religious” and “secular” for granted as essentially different domains of life, we established in the earlier events that people actually distinguish between them in a variety of different ways in different contexts, while some people resist the very idea of distinguishing between religious and secular. That raises the tricky question of whether scholars should use “religious” and “secular” as analytical categories, given that the boundary between them is not self-evident. However, we decided to focus instead on the broader question of how religious-secular distinctions work. In what particular ways do people distinguish religious from secular? Why do they make a particular distinction? And what are the consequences? What rides on the distinctions they make?