Political Theologies

What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? In recent years, Enlightenment secularization, as it appeared in the global spread of political structures that relegate the sacred to a private sphere, seems suddenly to have foundered. Unexpectedly, it has discovered its own parochialism—has discovered, indeed, that secularization may never have taken place at all.
With the "return of the religious," in all aspects of contemporary social, political, and religious life, the question of political theology—of the relation between "political" and "religious" domains—takes on new meaning and new urgency. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies—seek to take the full measure of this question in today's world.
This book begins with the place of the gods in the Greek polis, then moves through Augustine's two cities and early modern religious debates, to classic statements about political theology by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Essays also consider the centrality of tolerance to liberal democracy, the recent French controversy over wearing the Muslim headscarf, and "Bush's God talk." The volume includes a historic discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, concerning
the prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.

Hent de Vries is Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, where he holds Russ Family Chair and serves as the Director of the Humanities Center. He is currently also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and, from 2014 to 2018, he will serve as the next Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, at Cornell University. His principal publications include: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 2000), Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 2006), and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He was the coeditor, with Samuel Weber, of Religion and Media (Stanford University Press, 2001); the coeditor, with Lawrence Sullivan, of Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (Fordham University Press, 2006); and the coeditor, with Ward Blanton, of Paul and the Phi los o phers (Fordham University Press, 2013). In addition, he was the General Editor of the five- volume miniseries entitled The Future of the Religious Past, as well as of its first title, Religion Beyond a Concept (Fordham University Press, 2008). Currently, he is completing two book- length studies, entitled Of Miracles, Events, and Special Effects: Global Religion in an Age of New Media and Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices.