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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.

In this article we intend undertake a reading of ancient judaism, or veterotestamentary, in some of its main aspects, in contrast to the Machiavellian view of the role of religion in the organization and expansion of the State. The first step of this enterprise will be given by exposing the founding and delineanting features of the ancient Jewish tradition, especially in the books that make up the so-called Old Testament, demonstranting the using of religion in the ordination and expansion of the State, as well as in the formation of the individual. In a second moment we will demonstrate how to create a new Jewish tradition, influenced and influential on the ancient Greek world, early in the Christian era which will be assimilated and explored in its mystical bias in Renaissance humanism. This Hellenistic Judaism tradition will be best known and assimilated in the European erudite circles of the Renaissance. Finally, we will try to demonstrate how the constitutive features of ancient Judaism, to the detriment of Hellenistic Judaism, can be read in the light of Machiavellian description of the role of religion in the organization and expansion of the State and the formation of the individual.

Religious issues permeate the whole Rawlsian work. The problem is to know how people with different religious understandings can come to overlapping consensus. The solution to the problem of how political legitimacy can be achieved, despite religious conflict, and how, between citizens of different faiths, political justification can be pursued without reference to religious conviction is related to the idea of ​​public reason.

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.

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.

Islamism is not an abstract formula of Islamic faith, or even an excess of Islam. It comes from that context, yet in another level. This article will analyse it as a movement that, like any other social and political movement, has a certain doctrine and look for inspiration in a secular ideology that uses specific forms of political action to be succeeded. However, there is a difference: it is an ideology with religious precepts that become an immediate praxis, i.e., these precepts are reduced to instruments of analysis of social and political conflicts, thus justifying the dynamics political hostile political takeover. Islamism is a political ideology when forges governing formulas, based on the Quran, that demand the establishment of an Islamic state. It remains to determine the influence of religion in this political ideology. Adapted from the source document.

With this paper, we intend to understand what theoretical and empirical strategies allow us to measure the centrality and intensity of traditional religious meanings, as well as its more plural and diffuse modern expressions, in the individuals' life, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. For that purpose, we offer a conceptualization and measurement model of religion - an index of religiosity - that we consider being effective and adequate to describe and measure its manifold contemporary expressions and dimensions. In order to build our index, we drew on some of the existing patterns of measurement, namely Huber & Huber's work, and on three specific statistical databases: the European Values Survey (1999-2008), the European Social Survey (2002-2014), and the World Christian Database (2015). To go beyond the theoretical constructs and the standardization of a religiosity index, we analyze and measure religion in a specific group of European countries and we compare the various levels of religiosity among them.

Although generally considered a tolerant or even an ultra-pacifistic religion,
contemporary Buddhism is far from being free from internal political-religious tensions.
The present article sketches three conflicts: the first is located within the Kagyüpaline
where two sub-currents argue about the legitimacy of the spiritual leader of the
school; the second refers to the controversy over Dorje Shugden, a protective deity whose veneration was declared dangerous by the Dalai Lama and other leaders of the Guelugpa-school in opposition to the defenders of this religious practice; the third one is the dispute over Soka Gakkai whose status as a modern representative of Nichiren Buddhism is questioned by other Japanese Buddhist groups. After having laid out the basic characteristics of the three conflicts the article deals with their impact on contemporary Brazilian Buddhism.

The article presents some contributions of Wittgensteinian philosophy to philosophical theology. For this, it is divided into two moments. The objective of the first moment is the clarification of the semantics of theological discourse. We will see that, according to Wittgenstein, the significance of this discourse depends, necessarily, on the connection of doctrines with performances; in other words, theological sentences are only meaningful when they are linked to the lives of language users from a practical and evaluative point of view and not merely theoretical. By not fulfilling this criterion, the doctrine would need to be rejected or rephrased (clarifying the concept of rephrasing is also the objective of the first moment). We will see that this, shall we say, theological method, can be found, mutatis mutandis, in both the first and second philosophy of Wittgenstein. The objective of the second moment is the discussion of a case study on the doctrine of predestination. This discussion will show us how Wittgenstein himself applies his theological method, clarified by us in the first moment of the article.