Dr. Maxwell Kennel

Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies

Director of Pandora Press and Editor of the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies Series.

Co-Investigator on the CREATE Project and Affiliate at the Arcand Centre for Health Equity at NOSM University.

Author of Postsecular History (Palgrave, 2022) and Ontologies of Violence (Brill, 2023).

Editor of Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists. Trans. Victor Thiessen (Pandora, 2024), Thomas Kaufman’s The Anabaptists. Trans. Christina Moss (Pandora, 2024), and Hans-Jürgen Goertz’s Conrad Grebel (1498-1526): Critic of Pious Facades. Trans. Christina Moss (Pandora, 2025).

Co-Editor of Messianic Imagination (Cascade, 2025), and (with Berit Jany), Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Anabaptists: A Comedy in Two Acts. Trans. Lauren Friesen (Pandora, 2025).

Postsecular History

sira_46_3.cover

“Postsecular History: Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion and the Seventeenth Century Dutch Collegiant Movement,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 46/3 (September 2017): 406-432. DOI: 10.1177/0008429817701707

This study provides a particular historical reading of the postsecular moment. In an effort to problematize and historicize the claims of both the secular and the postsecular, this study draws a connecting line between a contemporary postsecular thinker (Daniel Colucciello Barber), and a group of religious dissidents in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic (the Collegiants). In order to demonstrate that the concept of the secular is value-laden and historically situated, the following will explore the ways in which an historical group shares many epistemological characteristics with present postsecular discourse.