Description: This book begins with the place of the gods in the Greek polis, then moves through Augustine's two cities and early modern religious debates, to classic statements about political theology by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Essays also consider the centrality of tolerance to liberal democracy, the recent French controversy over wearing the Muslim headscarf, and Bush's God talk.The volume includes a historic discussion between Jrgen Habermas and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, concerningthe prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.
Brief description: Lawrence E. Sullivan is Professor of World Religions at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions, he was director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, and served as President of the American Academy of Religions (AAR).
Review Quotes: If the idea of political theology seemed anachronistic to many liberal thinkers in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century-and especially since September 11-it has become urgent and unavoidable, essential for making sense of our current global situation. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan's Political Theologies constitutes the single most important collection of essays to date on a topic that is at once classic and contemporary, foundational and aporetic. These essays approach the multiple intersections of the political and the theological in the ancient, modern, and 'post-secular' worlds as both positive, mutually reinforcing, and necessary relationships, and violent, contradictory, and even impossible encounters. De Vries's Introduction masterfully surveys the varieties of the political-theological conjunction and presents a powerful analysis of its immanent excesses and paradoxical reversals, its terrifying histories and its transformative, even redemptive potentiality.-----Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles