ADAM B. SELIGMAN (Rutland, Vermont, 1954) is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston. He has lived and taught at universities in the USA, in Israel and in Hungary where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990–92. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (The Free Press, 1992), Innerworldly Individualism (Transaction Press, 1994), The Problem of Trust (Princeton University Press, 1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (Princeton University Press, 2000), Modest Claims, Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame University Press, 2004) and with Weller, Puet and Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). His work has been widely translated. He is director of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life (www.issrpl.org), organizing annual programs in different countries, exploring critial issues around religion and society and on how to live together with difference.