As mainstream Muslim leaders seek to distance Islam from the ‘deviancy’ of the jihadist attacks in Paris, a theologian argues that in an increasingly secular world all religions need to harness reason to belief Kafka’s remark, “religions get lost, as people do”, has haunted me in the wake of the Islamist violence in Paris, and in the weeks since the attacks I have found myself troubled by two questions. The first is about Islam and the kind of religion it is, and the second is about the growing confrontation between a certain kind of religion and a certain kind of modern­ity. The notion that a religion can “get lost” is simple. No longer guided by its lodestar, whether it be the life of its founder, its sacred texts or its canonical tradition