Suchergebnisse

Any reflection on the relationship between religion and politics in the Catholic thought cannot do without reminding the Augustinian distinction between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena. The goal and foundation of any just political community should be the orientation to wards the common good. In the contemporary catholic thought, Johann Baptist Metz proposes a political theology revolving around the concepts of the value of the human person, the necessary refusal, on the part of the Church, of any mundane ideology and the necessary use of the socially critical potential of theological thought. Hans Küng criticizes any politicization of theology. He insists on the development of an internal pluralism within the Church and advocates a self-limitation of the magisterial intervention in the world in the name of a necessary "eschato logical reserve". Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict the XVIth , invested with the magisterial authority, relies heavily on official documents of the Catholic social doctrine. He emphasizes the necessity of founding the state on the central value of justice and its acting according to the principle of subsidiarity. In this context, the Christian faith and the Church in particular may have a pedagogical role, as it may guide reason to follow the right priorities. All three thinkers agree on the public significance of the Christian vision of society and on the fact that it may help society both by its critical and by its constructive dimension.

Pierre Manent is viewed as a French thinker that develops in modern times the liberal tradition of political thinking. One of the most important issues of Manent's thinking that was not enough underlined it is the relationship between religion an politics and how this evolved from the beginning of Christianity until the main consequences of modernity. Manent view on religion and politics is the core of this paper analysis. The main contributions of Manent, such as Naissances de la politique moderne. Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), Histoire intellectuelle du lib.ralisme (1987) La cit. de l'homme (1994), Cours familier de philosophie politique (2001), La raison des nations. R.flections sur la d.mocratie en Europe (2006) are analyzed from this perspective. Our conclusion is that in the way Manent deals with the relationship between politics and religion there are some constants that may be found in all his work. These are: the relationship between the Church and the different forms of political organization in Europe (Civitas, Imperium, monarchy); the fact that Christianity is one of the few current relevant concepts for political, due to the failure of totalitarian ideologies; the idea that secularization in Europe is not irreversible; we live in "an age of separations", and Church-State is one of these separations; we witness the religion transformation process and the .tat la.que cannot survive to .tat-nation; the role of Islam in modern societies and his perpetual finding of a political form; the relationship between Judaism, state and nation; the issue of the Christian identity of Europe.

The Church-State relationships in EU Member States are in a process of a radical transformation. This is the result of a rapid political integration and also of the major transformations of the modernity. Religion is still part of the European public space even if, according to modernity premises, it should be only a private matter. According to Max Weber and other authors, secularization diminishes the role of the religion in society. However, these theories are being contested in recent years, due to the interpretation of statistical data and to the emergence of fundamentalist religious movements spreading around the world. Consequently, secularization is a tendency and not an "iron law". As regards the current role of the religion, Silvio Ferrari developed the theory according to which there is a common European model. This model does not exist yet, but certainly we live in an era defined by the continuous searching of such a model. There is no European identity without common values. Some of these values, like toleration, do have a profound religious foundation. European integration is based on the action of different actors, including interest groups located in Brussels. The Churches and the religious organizations are also part of this category of actors and they try to be part of a process by which a common space for consultation will emerge.

This article intends to analyze the role of religion in the public sphere in Habermas's theory. Despite the fact that the concept has been launched in a book published in 1961, only in 2005 the well-known German thinker has dealt explicitly with this issue. Even the critics of his public sphere model do not mention the lack of religion from the whole paradigm. Some of Habermas writings related to religion prior to 2005 are discussed. The role of religion in the public sphere is, according to Habermas, related with the issue of religious freedom and the State- Church separation, a model opposed to French laicïté. For Habermas, the state must not only be neutral to the religious discourse, but it must also encourage the participation of political organizations to public life. Another issue that is discussed by Habermas is the relationship between religious majorities and minorities. Habermas does assume a middle position between laicïté and the refuse of the modernity-imposed borders between religion and politics. The article takes an insight into the way Charles Taylor deals with the role of religion in the public sphere, a helpful argument for showing that the debate on this issue is only at the beginning.

At the end of World War I, Germany was neither politically, nor culturally
"attendable", for most of the European countries. In this context, one of the main
cultural aims of the Weimar Republic will be the resumption of the cultural and
academic relations with other countries. The foreign students were invested with a
major role in this respect. The Weimar Republic has taken institutional and financial
steps in order to intensify the student migration and to repopulate its universities
with foreign students, measures that have paid off in the mid 20s. In 1925, the
percentage of foreign students in Germany reached again the pre-war level. The
groups of foreign students best represented in the German universities were the
Romanians, the Bulgarians and the Polish. The paper also takes a look at the
evolution of the foreign students in Germany during 1918-1933, focusing on their
country of origin, the preferred institutions of higher education and fields of study,
as well as on the presence of female students from foreign countries in Germany.

This article aims to present the situation of the foreign students in general – and of Romanian students in particular – studying at German institutions of higher education during the
Third Reich. Beyond its quantitative considerations, which prove how intense was the migration of Romanian students to Nazi Germany the article highlights the political role assigned to the Romanian students by the Nazi authorities, as well as the political and ideological impact that the study in the Nazi universities had on the Romanian youth.

Drawing upon the first Romanian journal devoted to the broad promotion of hygiene and health education -The Sanitary and Hygiene Handbook- the article investigates the interaction between politics and medicine, politicians and doctors in modern Romania. Published uninterruptedly between 1899-1907 and considered "essential for the rural sanitary service", the journal shows the evolution and predicaments of the position of the medical profession: as public servants, the physicians were agents of the various territorial sanitary administrations; however, by virtue of their medical expertise and field experience, they were also harsh critics of local and central authorities, claiming a special status in both the design of health policies and their implementation on the ground. This dual and conflictive nature of the medical profession added to the increasing polarisation of the medical profession and of the sanitary staff as a result of the salient "proletarization" of its members in the rural areas, as opposed to the elitist character of the corporation in the capital, well represented among MPs. At the beginning of the 20th century, the debates hosted by the journal testify for the transformation of hygiene and medicine from a doctor-to-patient relation to a generally acknowledged policy sector.

The article examines a few episodes during the 1866-1871 legislatures of the Romanian Parliament. The debate on the annual budget for 1867 represents a good opportunity for the members of the Parliament to define politics as a matter of opinion, with negative connotations, in opposition to the face-value and clearness represented by the mathematical percentages and figures. The latter ought to guide, in their opinion, good governance, which does not belong to the realm of politics. According to such a mental scheme, the members of both Chambers of the Parliament appear to be convinced that majoritarian politics and the fragmentation of the political parties must be utterly rejected in order to adequately realize representation. The difficulty of the Romanian members of the Parliament to define politics influences their difficulty to define their own role, namely the nature of political representation.