Making Space for a Dialogical Notion of Religious Subjects: A Critical Discussion From the Perspective of Postsecularity and Religious Change in the West

In this article I address some topical themes from the ongoing discussion on contemporary religious change in the West and how it poses conceptual challenges to the study of religion. The academic discussion on religious change is vast and my observations are, of course, by necessity limited to my particular interest and argument in this article. On the one hand, I draw on some of the literature that has evolved within and around the concept of postsecularity and, on the other, on more general literature on contemporary religious change. Based on some selected observations, I underline the need to critically rethink how we conceptualize both religion and religious subjects. In my view, current research fosters a greater attentiveness of complexity with regard to religion, but simultaneously it requires us to take seriously a dialogical notion of religious subjects that provides a conceptual account of a subject constituted by being located within and emerging through ongoing social process. This dialogical notion provides a better tool for how current social and cultural reconfigurations of religion are simultaneously played out as a diversity of identities that challenge received categories, such as the religious and the secular.