ABSTRACT
Modern secularity in liberal and postcolonial states (a) affirms the ascendancy of the political over the religious, and (b) frames the ‘transactional’ relation between them - which includes across a continuum, a relation of distance or intimacy, neutrality and non-discrimination, autonomy, tolerance and publicity within the proscriptions set by political sovereignty. Ethical secularity, however, must commit itself to a dialogic engagement with the religious forms, notwithstanding, or especially because of, the hierarchic relation between the political and the religious.
