Redefining agency shifts the boundary between religious and secular

Evidence

It is essential, I think, to consider how, by whom, and in what context the concept of agency is defined and used if one is to get a better understanding of the ways “the religious” and “the secular” are continuously made and remade. Shifts in that concept, and in its connection with ideas of responsibility and consciousness, are crucial to revisions in our understanding of the religious—and therefore of the secular. What this calls for is not an abstract inquiry into mere changes in linguistic usage, but a response to questions about how the body lives pain and punishment, compassion and pleasure, hope and fear. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 483

Categorization

• QUESTION: Asad asserts the secular/religious boundary shifts with agency concepts but the mechanics remain compressed — worth tracing the causal chain more fully.