Why Politics Can't be Freed From Religion

by Strenski, Ivan

• ISBN13: 9781405176484
• ISBN10: 1405176482
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Why Politics Can't be Freed From Religion is an original, erudite, and timely new book from Ivan Strenski. Itinterrogates the central ideas and contexts behind religion, politics, and power, proposing an alternative way in which we should think about these issues in the twenty-first century.A timely and highly original contribution to debates about religion, politics and power - and how historic and social influences have prejudiced our understanding of these conceptsProposes a new theoretical framework to think about what these ideas and institutions mean in today's societyApplies this new perspective to a variety of real-world issues, including insights into suicide bombers in the Middle EastIncludes radical critiques of the religious and political perspectives of thinkers such as Talal Asad and Michel FoucaultDislodges our conventional thinking about politics and religion, and in doing so, helps make sense of the complexities of our twenty-first century world

Author Biography

Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including: Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002); Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003); The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006); Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion and Thinking About Religion: A Reader (both Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

When God Plays Politics: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power, and Politics

Interrogating Religion

Religion Trouble

Seeing tReligion: Six Common Clichés

Gagging at the Feast of Two Unexamined Assumptions: Religion, All Good or All Bad

The Religion-Is-No-Good Cliché

The Second Set of Two Clichés: Religion Is Belief and Belief in God

Religions Private Parts

Powerless in Paradise

Two Ways to Eliminate Religion

Is Religion Our Phlogiston? An Historical Test Case

Talal Asads Religion Trouble

The Trick of Defining Religion

Owning Religion

How Durkheim Took Ownership of Religion

Religion and Its Despisers

Interrogating Power

Confronting the Paradox of Power

How Power Plays Havoc with Thinking about "Institutional Violence"

Whom Should We Blame? History on Trial

Historys Helper: We Should Also Blame Foucault

Problematizing Power in South Africa

Foucault versus Foucault

Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Hierarchy

What More Is to Be Done? Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Social Force

Interrogating Politics

Defining Politics

Where There Is No Politics: Despotism and Totalitarianism

Autonomous Politics

Where Our Politics Makes No Sense

Politics, the Construct

Two Pernicious Views of Politics

History Lessons for Professor Morgenthau

What Constitutionalism Owes the Council of Constance

The Emergence of the Political . . . from the Religious

Machiavelli and Luther: Critical Contributions to the Autonomy of Politics

Foucaults Fault II: Everything Is Political

The Hidden Fascism of Thinking that Everything Is Political

Public and Private: No Absolute Line of Demarcation

Resisting the Panopticon

Afterword: The Autonomy of Politics and the Nation-State

Testing Interrogations of Religion, Power, and Politics: Human Bombers and the Authority of Sacrifice in the Middle East

Is Suicide Bombing Religious?

Making Too Much of Religion in Suicide Bombing: Islamofascism

Dying to Make Too Little of Religion in Suicide Bombing: Robert A. Pape

No Religion in Suicide Bombing: Talal Asad

How Religion Helps Explain Human Bombing

Human Bombing Is "Catastrophe," but also a "Triumph" of "Secular Immortality"

Human Bombing = Jihad + Sacrifice

Sacrifice or Suicide?

But Do Any Muslims Really Think Human Bombers Are Sacrifices?

Sacrifice Makes Authority

How and Why Sacrifice Works: The Authority of Sacralization

How and Why Sacrifice Works: No Free Gifts

Concluding Remarks

References

Index

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