Came across this article from a few years ago in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, a news source which hosts contributions from around the academe. Here, Stanley Fish gives his take on the return and rise of religion in the public sphere. It's an interesting comment if not lament on the importance and popularity of religious studies in universities today as the old boundaries between church and state, secular and sacred are eroded. In some ways 911 marked a crucial stage in this change, but I think it fair to say that it was just that, a mark. Fish argues that the role and perception of religion in western liberal democracies began to change decades earlier. After noting the work of Charles Taylor, Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre Fish offers this closing comment:

To the extent that liberalism's structures have been undermined or at least shaken by these analyses, the perspicuousness and usefulness of distinctions long assumed -- reason as opposed to faith, evidence as opposed to revelation, inquiry as opposed to obedience, truth as opposed to belief -- have been called into question. And finally (and to return to where we began), the geopolitical events of the past decade and of the past three years especially have re-alerted us to the fact (we always knew it, but as academics we were able to cabin it) that hundreds of millions of people in the world do not observe the distinction between the private and the public or between belief and knowledge, and that it is no longer possible for us to regard such persons as quaintly pre-modern or as the needy recipients of our saving (an ironic word) wisdom...

... When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.