Introduction

One of the formative assumptions of early social scientists about the future ‘better world’ was that it would be one where religion had disappeared from the public sphere. Consequently, a culture developed in Western academia where religion was rarely considered as something powerful, determinative and credible. Today, events on the ground are challenging these assumptions as a longstanding resurgence of religious politics and the erosion of modern secular ideals is taking hold in many parts of the world. Given this reality, it is alarming how few people in academia seem to grasp the problematic nature of academia’s secularist legacy, leaving us with troublingly limited intellectual resources for addressing one of the most defining issues of our age.