Jonathon S. Kahn (AB Princeton University; PhD, Columbia University 2003) is Professor of Religion. His teaching and writing interests are at the intersection of race, religious ethics, and politics. His current work explores the formation of modern versions of secularism. He is the editor of (with Vincent Lloyd) Race and Secularism in America(Columbia University Press, 2016). Other work on secularism appears in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education, (eds. Michael D. Waggoner and Nathan C. Walker, Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Pragmatism and Naturalism(ed. Matthew Bagger, Columbia University Press, forthcoming). He’s currently working on two book projects: What is a Secular Education? and Black Democratic Faith: Reconstruction for Difficult TimesKahn is also the author of Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2009), and his writing on Du Bois appears in several other places including Race and Political Theology(ed. Vincent Lloyd, Stanford University Press, 2012) and Philosophia Africana.
The texts I have identified as “need to become ‘essential’ texts” function in this spirit…Each addresses questions of community-creation outside of liberal norms and modes of power.