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An examination of historical problems created by religion highlights claims that one's power is a direct product of a Divine Right that gives a particular nation or leader a monopoly on truth. Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schroder said he was shocked when US President George W. Bush confided that he was "driven with a mission from God." Historians recognize that the current conflicts between the West & the Islamic world are rooted in the Age of Crusades & Arabic conquests in Europe when those of one religion fought peoples of other faiths to expand their own spheres of influence. It is argued that diversity is at the core of human evolution & no one can claim a monopoly on truth. Religion is a weighty factor in today's global rivalry & confrontations over different values & development models, as well as many other urgent global issues, including the current financial crisis. Emphasis is placed on the critical need to recognize the problems created by religion's mounting impact before it is too late. J. Lindroth

A review essay on books by (1) Joel Fetzer & Christopher Soper, Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany (New York: Cambridge U Press, 2005); (2) Jonathan Fox & Shmuel Sandler, Bringing Religion into International Relations (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004); (3) Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1998); (4) Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 1996); (5) Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics World-Wide (New York: Cambridge U Press, 2004); (6) Scott Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); & (7) Carolyn Warner, Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and Political (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 2000).

Soka Gakkai (Value Creation Academic Society), originally a religious org, went into politics in 1955 & has had an unprecedented success. It is opposed by Socialists & Communists. Its membership has increased more than 100 times since 1952. It emphasizes the creation of a worldly heaven, stresses faith healing & the solution of personal problems. The program has the strongest appeal among workers & small businessmen. It has successfully organized young people. The charge of fascism cannot be taken seriously. Its main aim is peaceful conversion & its entry into politics was only another means to increase the strength of the org. It has no pol'al program, but it shows the latent strength of ideas which seemed to have been rejected by the majority of the Japanese. IPSA.

Current approaches for understanding and analyzing religion in international politics insufficiently incorporate the role of ethics in the practices of religious actors. Primordialist approaches essentialize religion, instrumental approaches consider it to be an epiphenomenon, and cosmopolitan approaches a priori downgrade alternative ethical constructs as insufficiently universalist. An approach to religion that begins with a constitutive understanding of religious belief and economic, social, and political practice as outlined in Weber's Sociology of Religion, is more helpful. However, because Weber's method insufficiently addresses ethical intentionality, the 'neo-Weberian' approach I advance here incorporates the concepts of 'common good' and 'popular casuistry' into socio-historical contextualization. This approach provides a way to understand and theorize how religious adherents connect religious guidelines to moral action that avoids the essentialization of religion which is often characteristic of other perspectives. Adapted from the source document.

The past generation has witnessed a resurgence of religion in global politics, but political science has been slow to catch up with it. The reason lies in the secularism embedded in the field's major theories, one that reflects actual secularism in world politics, beginning with the events surrounding the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 & growing steadily through the middle twentieth century. Today, a small but growing number of political scientists have begun to explore religion, doing so in ways that depart from secular assumptions & embrace religion's distinctiveness to greater & lesser degrees. Adapted from the source document.

The Cold War is over. Instead, in international politics, oppositions partly conditioned by religious-cultural factors have become more pronounced. Even the expectation that modernisation marginalises religion is falsified by the fact of actually existing societies which combine both. The most conspicuous example of such a society is the United States. The political significance of this is that the US has proved more competent in handling the latest Balkan crisis than the "old" European countries under the umbrella of the European Union. Adapted from the source document.

Language and religion are arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world. Yet there have been very few efforts to compare the two in any sustained way. I begin by aligning language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and nationhood, and by sketching five ways in which language and religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. I then identify a series of key differences between language and religion and draw out their implications for the political accommodation of cultural heterogeneity. I show that religious pluralism tends to be more intergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalised than linguistic pluralism in western liberal democracies, and I argue that religious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot is that religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the political accommodation of cultural difference -- a striking reversal of the longer-term historical process through which language had previously displaced religion as the primary focus of contention. Adapted from the source document.

This article discusses the various historical & theoretical questions that characterize the relationship between religion & politics, & religion & totalitarianism. Given the complexity of this relationship, it limits itself to examining only certain aspects of it. (1) It defines the concepts of the sacralization of politics & totalitarianism & examines only those aspects of the latter that connect it directly with lay religion. It does not, therefore, offer any comprehensive interpretation either of totalitarianism or of secular religion. (2) It subsequently provides a historiographical verification of these theoretical questions, & examines, by way of various key examples, how the religious dimension of totalitarianism during the interwar period has been perceived & interpreted. Adapted from the source document.