Hey Jacib,
That's cool. I think there's a lot to be said about all of this. I'm familiar with Casanova and Jurgensmeyer, recently heard them speak at the annual meetings of the AAR at a pretty good panel discussion on secularism including Charles Taylor and others. I would be very curious to hear more about the advice he gave you.
I applied (for Fall 2010) to Divinity at Chicago, Religion and Columbia, anthropology at Princeton and Cornell, and Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. I'm hoping to do cultures of secularism/everyday secularism/practices of secularism, as well as institutions/processes/ideologies of secularism and secular governance-- in America, and potential comparative interest in Europe. So pretty open at this point. What about you?
I'm curious about what you mentioned about feeling marginalized in religion departments, and your reference to the NAASR. I am very familiar with the debates on reductionism/anti-reductionism vis a vis theory and method in the study of religion, as represented by McCutcheon, Segal, Fitzgerald, and others. Is this what you're referring to? It seems like over the years, religious studies as a discipline has been able to incorporate many of the reforms proposed by those guys, and their whole argument seems a bit dramatic in the light of this history. That was my impression at least.
I think it's (secularism) an essentially interdisciplinary area of study, and I regret not applying to sociology departments, seeing that a lot of the most intelligent and expansive commentary on secularism is issuing from that discipline. Anthropology is more insular than I ever knew, I'm finding.
Have you started a programme?