In 2007-2008, the Townsend Center funded the Strategic Working Group on Religion, Secularism, and Modernity. The SWG brought faculty together from across the campus to reflect collectively on alternative models and theories that might account for the singular role of religion in the modern world. According to co-conveners Robert Sharf (East Asian Languages and Cultures, Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies) and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology), there is a need to substantially interrogate the very categories that structure debates on religion, modernity, and secularity, both inside and outside academe. To claim that religion is ubiquitous, on the other hand, is as ideologically laden as the divide between religious practice and secular public life. The anthropological model of the all-cultural ignores the legal, political, and economic structures that come into play in matters pertaining to religion.

The SWG Religion, Secularism, and Modernity enabled faculty members across campus to hold an intellectual conversation that would not have been possible otherwise. The SWG faculty participants included specialists in the anthropology of religion, psychology of religion, sociology of religion, religion and art, religion and the environment, religion and gender, religion and law, religion and science, and so on. By gathering historians, economists, political scientists, and art historians all in one room, the goal of the SWG was to generate new models for understanding the nature and place of religion, both in the past and the present, and to develop and implement new models for the academic study of religion that would differ from those found elsewhere in the United States.