The Return of Religion reader engages with the popular assumption of the return of religion to the field of artistic practice and its discourses, the public sphere, contemporary politics, and media in the West as a constitutive "myth" of our current condition.

Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, a remarkable group of artists, art historians and theorists, scholars of religion, and sociologists unpack the historical underpinnings of religion's so-called "return," art's long-standing relationship with iconoclasm and connection to religious representation, the manipulation of certain religious imagery in the mass media, and contemporary art's potential to complicate and problematize commonly held beliefs about the role and potential of the image in today's world. The reader contains newly commissioned texts, a number of new translations, and adapted contributions from On Post-Secularism, a series of lectures and conversations that took place within the framework of The Return of Religion project in late 2008 and early 2009.