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A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990) ranges broadly over the political and literary terrain of the seventeenth century, examining the importance of the English Revolution as a decisive event in English and European history. It emphasises the historical significance of the English Revolution, exploring not only its causes but also its long term consequences, basing both in a broad social context and viewing it as a necessary condition of England's having nurtured the first Industrial Revolution.

Hebrew Reminiscences: Global Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in the Rise of Hermeneutic Thinking examines emerging approaches to the Old Testament in the late eighteenth century as constitutive to the period's egalitarian notions of textual interpretation and aesthetic sensibility. I argue that the universalization of the Hebrew Bible during this period was both instrumental and emblematic for the Enlightenment notion of a global community of interpreters. The dissertation evinces a parallel between the community of interpreters, established with the presumption that "hermeneutic thinking" is a universal human capacity, and the community of citizens in the modern nation state. Showing how interpretation was uprooted from its origins in specific religious cultures, the dissertation thus underscores the tensions pertaining to the symbolic communal form of the nation state in view of the separatist history of religious communities. The first and second chapters deal respectively with Johann Gottfried Herder's historiography and aesthetics, which he develops in his writings on the Old Testament. These chapters demonstrate that the consideration of biblical texts as a global asset holds a reciprocal connection to the emerging notion of "humankind." The third chapter examines Moses Mendelssohn's lobbying for emancipatory politics, and proposes that the interreligious circulation of the Old Testament shows secular constructs to be porous to competing religious values. The fourth chapter describes how Schleiermacher's psychological hermeneutics built on the replacement of the Old Testament with the New Testament as the model object for interpretation, and traces how literary realism evokes Jewish ritual to repond to the theological backdrop for this paradigm shift in hermeneutics. Considering the incessant identification of the Old Testament with Jews in twentieth-century German poetics and thought, I conclude that the persistence of the Bible's standing as an unchanging, material object of worship has posed a continual challenge to models of modern interpretation that highlight restoration--a seminal aspect of Protestant biblical interpretation in Enlightenment theology--as the hegemonic perspective on reading.

Volume Three of Ernest Fortin: Collected Essays discusses the current state of Christianity-especially twentieth-century Catholic Christianity-and the problems with which it has had to wrestle in the midst of rapid scientific progress, profound social change, and growing moral anarchy. In this volume, Fortin discusses such topics as Christianity and the liberal democratic ethos; Christianity, science, and the arts; Ancients and Moderns; papal social thought; virtue and liberalism; pagan and Christian virtue; and the American Catholic church and politics

This article contributes to the growing body of research on the increasing role of judicial systems in regulating politics and religion ('judicialization of politics and religion') across the globe. By examining how academic expertise is deployed in anti-extremist litigation involving Russia's minority religions, this article reveals important processes involved in this judicial regulation, in particular when legal and academic institutions lack autonomy and consistency of operation. It focuses on the selection of experts and the validation of their opinion within Russia's academia and the judiciary, and identifies patterns in the experts' approach to evidence and how they validate their conclusions in the eyes of the judiciary. Academic expertise provides an aura of legitimacy to judicial decisions in which anti-extremist legislation is used as a means to control unpopular minority religions and to regulate Russia's religious diversity. As one of the few systematic explorations of this subject and the first focused on Russia, this article reveals important processes that produce religious discrimination and the role that anti-extremist legislation plays in these processes.

This article intends to analyse the Machiavellian treatment of the Romans' religion. This is, we will argue, a fundamental issue to understand the way the relation between religion, foundation and politics is thought in Machiavelli's work. In the first part, we will analyse the chapters of the Discourses on Livy dedicated to the roman's religion, and contrast the statement of this section with statements on the religious phenomenon from other parts of Machiavelli's work, paying special attention to the understanding of the relation between the phenomenon of belief and popular obedience Machiavelli expresses. In the second part, we will face the question of the way in which it is possible to interpret Machiavellian writing, with special emphasis in the problem of how to make sense of the recurrent contradictions the text presents. In the third section, and as a conclusion, we present some reflections on Machiavelli's understanding of the relation between politics and religion, and the possibilities of a secular thought in the modern context. ; El presente artículo se propone examinar el tratamiento que da Maquiavelo a la religión de los Romanos. Esta cuestión, argumentaremos, resulta fundamental para dilucidar el modo en que se establece la relación entre religión, fundación y política en la obra del secretario florentino. Para llevar a cabo esta tarea, comenzaremos en la primera sección analizando los capítulos dedicados a la religión de los romanos en los Discursos sobre la primera década de Tito Livio con el propósito de contrastar las afirmaciones allí realizadas con afirmaciones sobre el fenómeno religioso en otros fragmentos de la obra. Nos importará en especial revisar la comprensión que Maquiavelo expresa de la relación entre el fenómeno de la creencia y la obediencia del pueblo. En la segunda sección nos ocuparemos de enfrentar la pregunta acerca del modo en que es posible interpretar la escritura maquiaveliana, con especial énfasis en el problema de cómo dar sentido a las recurrentes contradicciones que presenta el texto. En la tercera sección, y a modo de conclusión, presentaremos algunas reflexiones acerca del modo en que se plantea la relación entre religión y política, y las posibilidades de un pensamiento secular en el contexto moderno.

Writing in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Baghdad, Alfarabi (870-950) is unique in the history of premodern political philosophy for his extensive discussion of the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur'ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining Alfarabi's political writings as well as parts of his logical commentaries, his book on music, and other treatises, Alexander Orwin contends that the connections and tensions between ethnic and religious Ummas explored by Alfarabi in his time persist today in the ongoing political and cultural disputes among the various nationalities within Islam.According to Orwin, Alfarabi strove to recast the Islamic Umma as a community in both a religious and cultural sense, encompassing art and poetry as well as law and piety. By proposing to acknowledge and accommodate diverse Ummas rather than ignoring or suppressing them, Alfarabi anticipated the contemporary concept of "Islamic civilization," which emphasizes culture at least as much as religion. Enlisting language experts, jurists, theologians, artists, and rulers in his philosophic enterprise, Alfarabi argued for a new Umma that would be less rigid and more creative than the Muslim community as it has often been understood, and therefore less inclined to force disparate ethnic and religious communities into a single mold. Redefining the Muslim Community demonstrates how Alfarabi's judicious combination of cultural pluralism, religious flexibility, and political prudence could provide a blueprint for reducing communal strife in a region that continues to be plagued by it today

Intro -- Contents / Table des matières -- Preface -- Préface -- Tocqueville Revisited -- Catholic Republicanism Revisited -- « Démocratie catholique » et « démocratie chrétienne » -- The Influence of Catholic Socio-Political Theory on the Foundations of the Belgian Welfare State -- Rethinking the Origins of the Catholic Party in Liberal Italy -- Le catholicisme social dans le cône sud-américain -- Le MRP et le père Lebret à la Libération -- Perceptions and Realities -- Pillarization and Occupation in Dutch History -- Modern Ethno-National Visions and Missionaries from the Low Countries at China's Edge -- World Missions as a Field of Inspiration for New Vatican Strategies -- A Pope's Dilemma -- La réconciliation franco-italienne pour une Europe nouvelle -- Peace in the Magisterium of Twentieth-Century Popes -- L'internationalisme catholique des années 1920 -- Common and Different Interests since World War II -- The Cultural Political Perspective on the Benelux in Post-War -- 'We the peoples' -- Bibliography -- Contributors / Contributeurs -- Colophon.

Introduction: Challenging the Political - Religious Actors and Religious Arguments in Liberal Democracies (Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann and Ulrich Willems) -- Part I: Catholic-Latin states with low level or little religious pluralism -- Discursive Strategies of Catholic Churches in Assisted Reproduction Technology Regulation: Poland and Spain in Comparison (Anja Hennig) -- The Role of Religion in Debates on Embryo Research and Surrogacy in France (Jennifer Merchant) -- Embryonic Silences: Human Life Between Biomedicine, Religion, and State Authorities in Austria (Ingrid Metzler and Anna Pichelstorfer) -- Religion and Biopolitics in Ireland (Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann) -- Part II: Protestant(-English) states with high or moderate level religious pluralism -- Biotechnology and the Non-religious Uses of God Talk (John H. Evans) -- The Political Debate on Embryo Research in New Zealand and the Role of Religious Actors and Arguments (David Gareth Jones) -- The Political Debate on Embryo Research in Australia and the Role of Religious Actors and Arguments (Frank O'Keeffe and Kevin McGovern) -- Part III: Protestant(-Scandinavian) states with low level religious pluralism -- The Status of the Human Embryo: A Case Study of Embryo Experiments and Embryo Research in Denmark (Jacob Dahl Rendtorff) -- Religion and Biopolitics in Sweden (Göran Hermerén and Mats Johansson) -- Negotiating Embryo Politics in Norway and Italy (Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann and Massimiliano Passerini) -- Part IV: Mixed-confession states with high level religious pluralism -- The Role of Religion in the Political Debate on Embryo Research in the Netherlands (Wybo J. Dondorp and Guido M. W. R. de Wert) -- Moralizing Embryo Politics in Germany (Mirjam Weiberg-Salzmann) -- Bioethics and Biopolitics in Switzerland: Stem Cell Research and Pre-Implantation Diagnostics in the Public Discourse (Monika Bobbert and Yvonne Zelter) -- Morality Policies: How Religion and Politics Interplay in Democratic Decision-making in Belgium (Nathalie Schiffino) --