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'The Moral Bond of Community: Justice and Discourse in Christian Morality' by Bernard V. Brady is reviewed.

THE tendency among interpreters of Rousseau's political ideas has been to give, at most, cursory attention to the role played by religion in his thought. Although it is impossible to overlook the long penultimate chapter on civil religion in the Social Contract, analysts have generally viewed it as, at best, a Machiavelli-like attempt to provide emotional "cement" for the state or, at worst, as a lamentable and eccentric departure from Rousseau's main emphasis on the realization of freedom through democracy.

Intro -- Political Religion, Everyday Religion: Sociological Trends -- Copyright -- Contents -- About the Authors -- Introduction -- Part 1: Recent Developments in the Sociology of Religion: Theories and Approaches -- Religious Diversity: Sociological Issues and Perspectives -- From Theories of Secularization and Return of Religion - to Religious Complexity -- Social Semiotics in the Study of Religion -- More Dialogue between Approaches: Everyday Religion and Political Religion -- Religious Practices in the Framework of Ash Scattering and Contact with the Dead -- Methodological Challenges to the Study of Religious Peacebuilding -- Part 2: Normativity and Empirical Studies: Sociology of Religion in a Wider Context -- Sociology of Religion in Contexts: Institutional Constraints and Personal Beliefs -- Empirically Informed Theology -- Empirically Informed Ethics -- Hell, Perdition and Feelgood -- Part 3: Research Notes from Young Norwegian Sociologists of Religion -- Camping with God and Goffman -- From Sin to a Gift from God -- Street Religion: Faith among Romanian Beggars -- A Pilgrimage in the Mountains -- Preaching at Funerals -- Name and Subject Index.

Explores the usurpation of religion by fascist & other totalitarian regimes to further their own ends. Attempts by these governments to forge new moralities from existent religious beliefs are seen as efforts to engineer a new model of human being. In conveying the complexities of the relationship between political religions & social evil, the response of European Christians to pseudo-religious totalitarian dictatorships is explored. Grim experiences severed Christian Europe's ties to the extreme Right but clerics ignore the massive loss of life & misery resulting from Marxism & continue to flirt with ideologies of the totalitarian Left. A. E. Sadler

The author of the article addressed the issue of the fundamental problem of religion, which is embezzlement of its basic spiritual (saving) function and focus on the implementation of substitute functions, especially in the area of politics. Its expression is the emergence of a political religion, understood as a form of placing politics in the service of religion or religion in the service of politics. The article has been divided into three parts, which present the nature of religion itself (1), selected threats related to its politicization (2) and the basic ways of preventing the emergence and maintenance of political religion (3). ; Autor artykułu podjął kwestię fundamentalnego problemu religii, którym jest sprzeniewierzenie się swej podstawowej funkcji duchowej (zbawczej) i skoncentrowanie się na realizacji funkcji zastępczych, zwłaszcza w obszarze polityki. Jej wyrazem jest powstanie religii politycznej, rozumianej jako forma umieszczania polityki w służbie religii lub religii w służbie polityki. Artykuł został podzielony na trzy części, w których przedstawiono naturę samej religii (1), wybrane zagrożenia związane z jej upolitycznieniem (2) oraz podstawowe sposoby zapobiegania powstawaniu i utrzymaniu religii politycznej (3).

This article explores the ways in which theories of political religion can contribute to our understanding of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, & not least to the problem of the emotional enthusiasm they undoubtedly mobilized. The article contains comparative materials drawn from Germany, Italy, & the Soviet Union, & discusses such major thinkers as Eric Voeglin, whose 1938 essay on political religions was seminal to this approach. Adapted from the source document.

In an article published in September 1939, in the very eye of the storm of twentieth-century Europe's 'age of extremes', the British historian Christopher Dawson attempted to get to grips with the temper of his times. Opining on what he saw as the failure of nineteenth-century liberal individualism and its deleterious encroachment on spiritual values, he wrote:
Now the coming of the totalitarian state marks the emergence of a new type of politics which recognises no limits and seeks to subordinate every social and intellectual activity to its own ends. Thus the new politics are in a sense more idealistic than the old; they are political religions based on a Messianic hope of social salvation. But at the same time they are more realist since they actually involve a brutal struggle for life between rival powers which are prepared to use every kind of treachery and violence to gain their ends.
When not researching medieval Christian encounters with the Mongols, Dawson wrote history with a grand narrative sweep such as he admired in the work of the German historian Oswald Spengler. His output has recently sparked a revival of interest, with claims that he was one of most significant Catholic historians of the century. Yet this Augustinian pessimist was only one of a broader band of contemporary intellectuals – not all of them religious apologists – to brandish the label of 'political religion' as a descriptor, and as a moral warning. Seventy years on, the same moral seriousness characterises several of the books under review here, especially those addressing the more terrifying consequences of political religion in its various forms. For as A. James Gregor declares when introducing his intellectual history of Totalitarianism and Political Religion, 'the unnumbered dead of the past century' are surely owed some posthumous explanation:
Amid all the other factors that contributed to the tragedy, there was a kind of creedal ferocity that made every exchange a matter of existential importance. The twentieth century was host to systems of doctrinal conviction that made unorthodox belief a capital affront, made conflict mortal, and all enterprise sacrificial (Gregor, xi).