Search results

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers-Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley-have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion's encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley's own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley's substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley's non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor's account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god's timeless act of creation. Anne O'Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau's political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt's category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley's ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley's own 'mystical anarchism' and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel's reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. Alistair Welchman is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio who is interested in questions of naturalism and materialism, especially but not exclusively in relation to French and German philosophy since Kant. In addition he works as a translator, mostly of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation (for Cambridge) but also of Salomon Maimon's Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Continuum) and has a growing interest in political questions stemming from his situation on the US-Mexico border.

The Politics of Religion in Restoration England. Edited by Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie From Persecution to Toleration. The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. By John Spurr

Gözaydın, İştar -- (Dogus Author) Conference full title: Istanbul Spring School: Islam and The Non-Muslim Other: Doctrines, Attitudes, and Practices, 26-28 March 2012. Istanbul: Liberales Institute. ; This article is primarily concerned in a power struggle within Turkey for over the last 80 years, leaving aside a much longer one of 200 years. Working on religion, politics and politics of religion anywhere involves varies parties as the state, the society, and the individual of the political body of that given country. In order to try to understand the statereligion relationship in Turkey, I suggest that Presidency of Religious Affairs / Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı should be scrutinized as an initial step. Within the Turkish society, there have been existing an increasing friction between two groups that may roughly be defined as laicists1 and Islamists2 during the whole republican era ongoing since 1923, but has become more visible especially in the 1990's. In this article, I will be debating on the basic and crucial questions, as I perceive it, 'what is a capacitated democracy and how to achieve it?' in the context of law and politics in Turkey. Actually, in order to evolve my argument, I will initially be focusing on the development of the relations among the state, the groups in society, and religion in the Republic of Turkey. Then, I will be discussing the need and possibility of a mutually acceptable ground for a peaceful coexistence in this country. Obviously my preference to work on the last 80 years instead of the 200 year span of the phenomenon stems out of my acceptance of the republican times to be a more visible stage of the above mentioned contestation. ; The Netherlands Interuniversity Scholl for Islamic Studies (NISIS), The Instıtute D'etudes De l' Islam Et Des Societes Du Monde Musluman

The popular insurrection in Nicaragua is examined against the backdrop of the grass-roots mobilization & protest that built up between 1968 & 1978. Particular attention is given to the linkages between grass-roots religious change & political mobilization. It is argued that the democratization of religious experience in the decade following the 1968 meeting of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin greatly facilitated the participation of the poor in the Nicaraguan revolution, but that it also sowed the seeds of intra-Church conflict after the triumph of the revolution. Posttriumph conflict between the Church hierarchy & the so-called popular Church are then examined, to show that the major religious issue in revolutionary Nicaragua is not Marxism vs the Church, but democratization in the Church & in the political order. HA

Tibetan Buddhism, rather than secular nationalist ideology, provides vital idioms for the political discourse on Tibetan independence. This article deals with the interrelations between Tibetan politics and religion within Tibet and in exile Tibetan settlements in India. It is argued that within and outside Tibet, popular expressions of Tibetan identity rely on religious symbolism. In Tibet, religious idioms are reappearing in completely new contexts, as political expressions of opposition to Chinese rule. In India, Tibetan refugee elites reinterpret these idioms in their own terms while redefining Tibetan identity and culture for the outside world and for refugees themselves. The educated, English-speaking sections of the refugee population are also the main producers of nationalist rhetoric in the secular sense. This is particularly true of those who are based in Dharamsala, the Indian headquarters of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. After examining the `culture' of Tibetan politics, the questions raised are how and why secular nationalist arguments, rather than arguments based on religion, become a part of political discourse. The choice of arguments is found to reflect the notions of legitimacy and rhetoric of the different audiences addressed. Power relations surface in every aspect of politics, including the use of political languages and definition of the boundaries and contents of `the political'.