Volume 53 of Arc: Journal of the School of Religious Studies is a special themed issue on secularism, public religions, and freedom. It also looks at the field-defining place McGill University and its School of Religious Studies hold in both the study of religion and the study of secularism. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, one of the pioneers of religious studies in North America, taught courses in comparative religion at McGill, one of which Charles Taylor took as an undergraduate in 1950 and has described as transformative. Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), written in Berlin in conversation with Hans Joas and Jose Casanova, was in turn transformative and determinative for all later studies of the secular, and it remains the touchstone in the field. In 2025, all three scholars returned to McGill for a retrospective seminar with graduate students on their work on secularism and religion and on the future of these concepts.
Building on that seminar, this volume brings together articles and book reviews that reflect on the many ways secularism, secularity, politics, and history can be thought together. Contributors take up questions such as: What are secularism and religion, and how do context and time change their definitions? How are the concepts of religion and the secular related? In what ways can the secular be political, and the political secular? How does the work of Charles Taylor remain relevant, how has it fallen short, and how should it be superseded? How is the secular understood in the media and in public policy? Is the secular singular or multiple, given the different historical and religious trajectories of political and religious contexts around the world?
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