Although it seems impossible to provide a definition of “religion” that would likely be consensual, religion yet appears to be an essential analytical key to account for the transformations of the contemporary world. Hence the new visibility religion has acquired in the public and scientific debate in the last few years: the debate has shifted from discussions specific to the sociologists of religion to an appropriation of religion by different disciplinary and theoretical approaches. This has led to interpretations through the religious lens of, among other things, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, the political evolution of the Middle East, the management of immigration, and even the “civil unrest” in the suburbs of France.

This new visibility of religion does nothing to prevent it from representing a continuing enigma: is religion still disappearing? Or is it endlessly reemerging? Besides, when religion is foregrounded nowadays, it is often something else that is at stake: the relation to the other (and thus to pluralism) or rather, identity and consequently the relevance of the criteria that will allow us to define identity. A precondition of this milieu is the inability to find a register of discourse that is better adapted to what tries to be formulated. Herein religion would be the vehicle through which could be articulated, in the words of Michel de Certeau, “both the necessity and impossibility of taking hold again of the whole” (2003: 142).