Description:
What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? In recent years, Enlightenment secularization, as it appeared in the global spread of political structures that relegate the sacred to a private sphere, seems suddenly to have foundered. Unexpectedly, it has discovered its own parochialism--has discovered, indeed, that secularization may never have taken place at all.
With the "return of the religious," in all aspects of contemporary social, political, and religious life, the question of political theology--of the relation between "political" and "religious" domains--takes on new meaning and new urgency. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished scholars from many disciplines--philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies--seek to take the full measure of this question in today's world. 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 Jürgen 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