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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 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. The 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. Chapters 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, concerning the pre-political moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.

This book, the first themed volume in the series The Future of the Religious Past, elaborates the manifold and fascinating interconnections between power and religion. It brings together scholars from many disciplines and countries to research forms of religion in a way unfettered by the idea that religion is solely or even primarily a matter of belief in specific tenets or intellectual systems—it is also a matter of multiple particulars in individual and social life, such as powers, things, gestures, and words. Dealing with the nexus of religion and power, this volume radically undermines the idea that the political relevance of religion is a thing of the past. Its essays treat power as a central aspect of religion on many levels, from that of macro-politics through the links between religion and nationhood to the level of personal empowerment or its obverse, disempowerment. Power and religion are both omnipresent in human action and interaction. There is no human act that does not include some kind of faith in a positive outcome and no deed in which power does not play some role. People obviously can attempt to use religion as an instrument to enhance their power or improve their status, whether personally or at the level of the nation state. Yet religion is in principle ambiguous in relation to power: It can disempower as well as empower, and it can even function as a critique of existing power relations. Moreover, there is the consolatory function of religion, offering ways of compensation, of healing, and of enduring feelings of powerlessness.