Why Politics Can't be Freed From Religion

by Strenski, Ivan

• ISBN13: 9781405176491
• ISBN10: 1405176490
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-08
• 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	p. xi
When God Plays Politics: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power, and Politics	p. 1
Interrogating 'Religion'	p. 8
Religion Trouble	p. 8
'Seeing' Religion: Six Common Clichés	p. 11
Gagging at the Feast of Two Unexamined Assumptions: Religion, All Good or All Bad	p. 14
The Religion-Is-No-Good Cliché	p. 21
The Second Set of Two Clichés: Religion Is Belief and Belief in God	p. 24
'Religion's' Private Parts	p. 33
Powerless in Paradise	p. 35
Two Ways to Eliminate 'Religion'	p. 36
Is Religion Our Phlogiston? An Historical Test Case	p. 39
Talal Asad's 'Religion' Trouble	p. 42
The Trick of Defining 'Religion'	p. 46
Owning 'Religion'	p. 50
How Durkheim Took 'Ownership' of 'Religion'	p. 55
Religion and Its Despisers	p. 59
Interrogating 'Power'	p. 62
Confronting the Paradox of 'Power'	p. 62
How 'Power' Plays Havoc with Thinking about "Institutional Violence"	p. 66
Whom Should We Blame? 'History' on Trial	p. 70
History's Helper: We Should Also Blame Foucault	p. 81
Problematizing Power in South Africa	p. 84
Foucault versus Foucault	p. 88
Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Hierarchy	p. 90
What More Is to Be Done? Thinking about Power as Auctoritas and Social Force	p. 97
Interrogating 'Politics'	p. 100
Defining 'Politics'	p. 100
Where There Is No Politics: Despotism and Totalitarianism	p. 102
Autonomous Politics	p. 105
Where Our 'Politics' Makes No Sense	p. 107
Politics, the Construct	p. 109
Two Pernicious Views of 'Politics'	p. 112
History Lessons for Professor Morgenthau	p. 116
What Constitutionalism Owes the Council of Constance	p. 119
The Emergence of the Political…from the Religious	p. 123
Machiavelli and Luther: Critical Contributions to the Autonomy of Politics	p. 125
Foucault's Fault II: 'Everything Is Political'	p. 130
The Hidden Fascism of Thinking that Everything Is Political	p. 133
Public and Private: No Absolute Line of Demarcation	p. 135
Resisting the Panopticon	p. 136
Afterword: The Autonomy of 'Politics' and the Nation-State	p. 140
Testing Interrogations of 'Religion,' 'Power,' and 'Politics': Human Bombers and the Authority of Sacrifice in the Middle East	p. 142
Is 'Suicide' Bombing Religious?	p. 142
Making Too Much of Religion in 'Suicide' Bombing: 'Islamofascism'	p. 144
Dying to Make Too Little of Religion in 'Suicide' Bombing: Robert A. Pape	p. 147
No Religion in 'Suicide' Bombing: Talal Asad	p. 150
How Religion Helps Explain Human Bombing	p. 153
Human Bombing Is "Catastrophe," but also a "Triumph" of "Secular Immortality"	p. 155
Human Bombing = Jihad + Sacrifice	p. 160
Sacrifice of Suicide?	p. 164
But Do Any Muslims Really Think Human Bombers Are 'Sacrifices'?	p. 168
Sacrifice Makes Authority	p. 175
How and Why Sacrifice Works: The Authority of Sacralization	p. 176
How and Why Sacrifice Works: No Free Gifts	p. 180
Concluding Remarks	p. 182
References	p. 187
Index	p. 196
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