A secular age? The 'modern world' and the beginnings of the sociology of religion / Wolfgang Knobl -- The silence on the land: ancient Israel versus modern Palestine in scientific theology / Paul Michael Kurtz -- What means to be 'secular' in the German Kaiserreich? An intervention / Lucian Holscher -- Secularism in the long nineteenth century between the global and the local / Rebekka Habermas -- Retrieving tradition? The secular-religious ambiguity in nineteenth century German-Jewish anarchism / Carolin Kosuch -- Catholic women as global actors of the religious and the secular / Relinde Meiwes -- Negotiating the fundamentals? German missions and the experience of the contact zone, 1850-1918 / Richard Holzl and Karolin Wetjen.