“Abraham is modern, Plato is not: this is the seemingly paradoxical position carefully argued for in Levene’s fine book, where she transforms received ideas about religion and modernity, with the help of erudite and elegant readings. Key to her demonstration is a new understanding of history: not the realization of a promise, but the injunction to leave for the other’s land. This is immensely helpful when postsecular ideologies struggle with their own confusion, calling for a new beginning of critique.”

Etienne Balibar

“Powers of Distinction can be understood as a major contribution to what has been called post-secularism, a field often taken as the study of the afterlife of religion in fundamentally secular western modernity. But for Levene, the religious and the secular in modernity are not self-sufficient and opposed propositions; in fact, the belief in the opposition of those ideas, whether in favor of the religious or the secular, is what modernity, in Levene’s sense, refuses. This book will be of greatest interest to scholars and students of religion, but by no means will it be limited to people working in ‘religious studies,’ a category that is indeed fundamentally redefined here.”

Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles

"...the most important work in the study of religion in at least a generation. Hopefully in the decades to come, it will be broadly acknowledged as a classic."

Martin Kavka | Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“This is an audacious and impressive book, whose bold readings of canonical figures – Anselm, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, and others – are located in an intellectual framework where central terms – religion, history, truth, God – are themselves subject to review. That this book is engaging and illuminating, despite divesting with stable terrain, is testament to Levene’s intellectual agility and insight. . . . Levene’s book is striking and persuasive; its greatest strength is to render freshly compelling the renewal of modernity, a project which is necessary, impossible, and ‘never complete.’”

Danielle Sands | Religious Studies

"...a wonderful book to think with...[Powers of Distinction is] an ambitious book, offering accounts of modernity, religion, and history among other things."

Theodore M. Vial | Journal for the History of Modern Theology