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This paper offers a review of religion and politics in the United Kingdom shortly after the Scottish Referendum in September 2014 and the UK General Election in May 2015. It first provides a brief historical outline of the emergence of the four separate parts of the current United Kingdom, their different experiences of Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions and responses to the Reformation in the fifteenth century after a millennium of Roman Catholicism. It then briefly reviews data from recent censuses and social attitude surveys about religious identities, beliefs and commitment and political party preferences which generally indicate a preference for Conservative Party support by Anglicans and Labour by Roman Catholics. Recent Church of England leaders have suggested that religion is now a major player on the public stage. This is strongly rejected. Firstly, census and survey data point unambiguously to the declining salience of religion and the public's strong belief that religion is a private and personal matter and that religious leaders should not meddle in politics. Secondly, three examples are given where it is argued that critical interventions by religious leaders in recent years have not led to any serious changes in government policies.

Since 9/11 politicians, preachers, conservatives and the media are all speaking about evil. In the past the dicourse about evil in our religious, philosophic and literary traditions has provoked thinking, questioning and inquiry. But today the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscure compex issues, block serious thinking and stifle public discussion and debate.We are now confronting a clash of mentalities, not a clash of civilisations. One mentality is drawn to absolutes, moral certainties, and simplistic dichotomies of good and evil. The other seriously question

In recent decades two major approaches sought to explain the intersection of Mizrahi ethnicity and citizenship in Israel. Since the early 1990s, Yoav Peled's Multiple Citizenship paradigm has become dominant in explaining the differential, hierarchical and fragmented incorporation regime. Accordingly, affiliation to Jewish religion was part of an ethno-national discourse of citizenship which confined Mizrahim (Jews emanating from Muslim countries) to be trapped between the hegemonic Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent) and the Palestinian citizens. Recently, a counter explanation was offered, based on the interpretive repertoires that shape the political behavior of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Contrary to the liberal presuppositions of the Multiple Citizenship paradigm, this explanation places greater emphasis on cultural rather than material factors shaping political behaviours and even broader worldviews, while identifying each ethnic group with opposing cultural repertoires. By proposing the idea of "ethnic thinking" this article focuses on the entanglements of religiosity in Mizrahi politics in two case studies – the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow (the Keshet) and New Mizrahim. Rejecting the tendency to identify Mizrahim as predisposed to traditionalism, this article challenges both approaches that arguably fail to account for the performative aspects of Mizrahi citizenship.

In the United States, people are deeply divided along lines of race, class, political party, gender, sexuality, and religion. Many believe that historical grievances must eventually be left behind in the interest of progress toward a more just and unified society. But too much in American history is unforgivable and cannot be forgotten. How then can we imagine a way to live together that does not expect people to let go of their entrenched resentments?Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. Jeffrey Israel explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives. Israel calls on us to distinguish between what belongs in a raucous "domain of play" and what belongs in the domain of the political. He builds on the thought of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum to defend the liberal tradition against challenges posed by Frantz Fanon from the left and Leo Strauss from the right. In provocative readings of Lenny Bruce's stand-up comedy, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, and Norman Lear's All in the Family, Israel argues that postwar Jewish American popular culture offers potent and fruitful examples of playing with fraught emotions. Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion is a powerful vision of what it means to live with others without forgiving or forgetting

This article explores the Islamic home-film movement in Kerala, India, a video film movement by amateur filmmakers of the Muslim Community. These films circulate in VCD and DVD format in retail outlets in both Kerala and the Gulf Council Countries (GCC). These films are important for their supporting group, Jamaat-e-islami, one of the most powerful Islamist groups in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as they try to gain hegemony among Kerala's Sunni Muslims through an alternative Islamic public culture. Home-films now circulate beyond their original audience of Muslim women in Kerala, among Keralite migrants in the Arab Gulf, who organize public screenings in social gatherings and labour camps. Indeed, the large-scale migration of labor to the GCC has led to a re-imagination of the moral geography of Kerala Muslim households to account for changing gender norms and family structures. The films, concerned with social reform among the Muslim Community of Kerala, also refract the experience of migration to the GCC, particularly in narrating an emotional landscape characterized by precarious conditions of labour, racialised hierarchy and the kafala (the specific employment system in many GCCs, that is a combination of a contract and patronage) through specific tropes of precarity and philosophy of risk in these films.