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Engaging R. Scott Appleby’s The Ambivalence of the Sacred in the Time of Confident Religions

R. Scott Appleby’s notion of the “ambivalence of the sacred” and his approach to interreligious dialogue link the analytic and normative components of the study of religion and thus carry a particular weight in our moment—a time of confident religions, in which the discourse of power reigns over our analyses and politics. Re-engaging these two elements of Appleby’s work has significant repercussions for understanding the relationship between the agency and responsibility of religious actors, and for reframing our investigations into the “thicker” meaning of power, which religious actors especially have a capacity to inaugurate into the arena of politics.