In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands.

1. Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and Secularity: Engaging the Paradox; Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel, Irene Stengs. - Part 1. Culture.- 2. The Boomerang Effect of Culturalized Religion: Nativist Affect Vs. Non-Consensus-Based Collaboration; Ernst van den Hemel.- 3. “We” and “The Others” as Constituents of Symbolic Politics: On the Populist Exploitation of Long-lasting Nationalist Sentiments and Resentments Regardings Citizenship in Germany; Irene Götz.- Part 2. Public Sphere.- Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics of Contestations of Public Spaces in Northern Nigeria; Murtala Ibrahim.- 4.  Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the Visibility and Erasure of a Muslim Minority in Hindu India; Stefan Binder.- Part 3. Tolerance.- 5. "Homo Sanctus": Religious Contestations and the Sanctification of Human Rights in Vietnam; Oscar Salemink.- 6. Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious Other in the Netherlands; Jan Willem Duyvendak.- 7. Dutch Tolerance in Black and White; Alex van Stipriaan.- Part 4. Images.- 8. Worshipers and Iconoclasts: Clashes about Colonial Statues in the Netherlands; Markus Balkenhol.- 9. Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing, and Enargeia; Herman Roodenburg.- Part 5. Bodies.- 10. Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the Sacred; Jojada Verrips.- 11.  Samba Struggles: Carnival Parades, Race and Religious Nationalism in Brazil; Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Santos Godoy.- 12. United in Competitive Mourning. Commemorative Spectacle in Tribute to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand; Irene Stengs.- Epilogue; Birgit Meyer.

How do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled across the world? In exploring this theme, The Secular Sacred focuses on diverse topics such as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria, and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands.The contributions focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce, and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. The Secular Sacred will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and social psychologists, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies and semiotics.

“While the secular materialism of religious institutions has long received extensive critical discussion, the complex mutual entailment of secular and religious ideas and practices has attracted far less attention. These attractively written, empirically grounded, and critically oriented essays offer revelatory insights into the play of secularity and religiosity in persons, images, spaces, ideologies, and institutions.” — Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, and IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies, Leiden University

Integrates concepts developed in recent religious studies with concepts employed in the study of nations and nationalism Investigates the crucial and timely issue of the relationship between religion and populism (or neo-populism) in western democracies Opens up a new research track with genuinely multidisciplinary methodological approaches