Why Do Religious Forms Matter?: Reflections on Materialism, Toleration, and Public Reason

In Why Do Religious Forms Matter?, Pooyan Tamimi Arab reflects on the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity.

Taking as a starting point the insight that religions manifest in myriad sensible forms—in architecture, in images, in the use of objects in rituals, and in distinctive ways of speaking—Tamimi Arab traces to Spinoza the material-religion approach prevalent in anthropology and religious studies. It is in Locke’...