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This challenging collection of essays offers a refreshing approach to the troubling--and timely--subject of religion and public policy in America, and the ways in which issues of church and state affect our national identity.

The result of a series of conferences on religion and politics conducted by the Public Religion project at the University of Chicago, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, this collection brings together an extraordinarily diverse set of contributors. Represented within its pages are the ideas and opinions of scholars, politicians, and religious leaders with backgrounds in law, politics, history, and divinity, among them Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. With its wide range of critical approaches and varied perspectives, this volume makes a vibrant contribution to the national dialogue on politics and religion.

Chief among the essay topics are the evangelical roots of American political life; early conflicts between Enlightenment thinking and spiritual impulses in developing a national identity; the practical problems that today's politicians face in campaigning; the impact of constitutional and legal language regarding our definitions of religion; and the way in which the media's treatment of our spiriutal life frames our perceptions of it. These thought-provoking essays will inspire readers to rethink, argue, perhaps act, but most importantly, to converse about this timely and important issue.

This volume will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of history, religious studies, and political science will find great value within its pages, as will scholars of divinity and law, and members of this general public concerned with the intersection of faith and politics in American life.

Essays that broaden the historical scope and sharpen the parameters of competitive discourses

Scholars in the fields of late antique Christianity, neoplatonism, New Testament, art history, and rabbinics examine issues related to authority, identity, and change in religious and philosophical traditions of late antiquity. The specific focus of the volume is the examination of cultural producers and their particular viewpoints and agendas in an attempt to shed new light on the religious thinkers, texts, and material remains of late antiquity. The essays explore the major creative movements of the era, examining the strategies used to develop and designate orthodoxies and orthopraxies. This collection of essays reinterprets dialogues between individuals and groups, illuminating the mutual competition and influence among these ancient thinkers and communities.

Features:

• Essays feature competitive discourse as the central organizing theme
• Articles present unique theoretical models that are adaptable to different contexts and highly applicable to religious discourses before and after the Late Antique Period
• Scholars cover a much wider range of traditions including Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and philosophy in order to provide the most complete portrait of the religious landscape

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

A nation founded on church-state separation is still debating where the line is drawn

In recent years a series of highly publicized controversies has focused attention on what are arguably the sixteen most important words in the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The ongoing court battles over the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the now annual cultural quarrel over “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays,” and the political promotion of “faith-based initiatives” to address social problems—all reflect competing views of the meaning of the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment.

Such disputes, as Bruce T. Murray shows, are nothing new. For more than two hundred years Americans have disagreed about the proper role of religion in public life and where to draw the line between church and state. In this book, he reexamines these debates and distills the volumes of commentary and case law they have generated. He analyzes not only the changing contours of religious freedom but also the phenomenon of American civil religion, grounded in the notion that the nation's purpose is sanctified by a higher authority—an idea that can be traced back to the earliest New England colonists and remains deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

Throughout the book, Murray connects past and present, tracing the historical roots of contemporary controversies. He considers why it is that a country founded on the separation of church and state remains singularly religious among nations, and concludes by showing how the Supreme Court's thinking about the religious liberty clauses has evolved since the late eighteenth century.

Assessing issues related to the Orthodox Church from an academic, secular point of view is a sensitive matter. However, by tracing and interpreting the engagement of the Serbian Church with the memory of Serbian heroic victimhood in World War II through a kind of “methodological agnosticism,” this volume has managed to tackle the subtle topic in a very delicate and value-neutral way. Arguing that the search for a collective memory is particularly urgent in the face of societal uncertainty and that religious institutions often use their memory potential to reaffirm their public relevance, the book examines the motivations, forms, strategies, and outcomes of a wide range of mnemonic activities the Serbian Orthodox Church engaged in following the upheavals caused by the collapse of Yugoslav socialism, the violent dissolution of the country, and the fall of the Milošević regime. These activities, taking place within the memory fields framed by the post-socialist, post-conflict, and post-secular horizons, took liturgical and non-liturgical forms, often involving a hybrid fusion of the two. As a result of this mnemonic endeavor, the author argues, the Church was successful in reasserting its power and legitimacy in the public sphere of post-2000 Serbia.

From the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, haciendas dominated the Latin American countryside. In the Ecuadorian Andes, Runa—Quichua-speaking indigenous people—worked on these large agrarian estates as virtual serfs. In Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, Barry Lyons probes the workings of power on haciendas and explores the hacienda's contemporary legacy.

Lyons lived for three years in a Runa village and conducted in-depth interviews with elderly former hacienda laborers. He combines their wrenching accounts with archival evidence to paint an astonishing portrait of daily life on haciendas. Lyons also develops an innovative analysis of hacienda discipline and authority relations. Remembering the Hacienda explains the role of religion as well as the reshaping of Runa culture and identity under the impact of land reform and liberation theology.

This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the understanding of social control and domination. It will be valuable reading for a broad audience in anthropology, history, Latin American studies, and religious studies.

Employed on Good Friday, the texts provided mute actors with roles and props with which to reenact the removal of Christ from his cross, his placement into the arms of his grieving mother, and his burial—his Deposition. Through rare translations, vivid historical accounts, and rich cultural insight, the book uncovers how these ceremonies moved audiences to tears, shaped local Catholicisms, and still have the power to stir hearts today.

Such theatrical reenactments were common among Nahuas and Mayas during the colonial period only to become largely overlooked by the scholarly literature on religion. The texts examined here provide not only examples of performances but also insight into how translation altered their content and meaning. More than simply plays or sermons, these hybrid performances  merged European tradition with Nahua and Maya storytelling, creating unforgettable moments of faith, grief, and beauty. Familiarized through local worldviews, concerns, preferences, and language, these texts provide additional and important insights into myriad issues including those of gender, agency, and how Christianity adapted its message of the Deposition to accommodate Indigenous audiences of different cultures. Christensen also mines the deep well of existing European literature on the subject to clearly distinguish the aspects derived from the Old World from those from the New.

The first book examining how the Aztec and Maya were taught about and engaged in the Deposition, Removing Christ from the Cross exposes the colonial origins of modern Latin American commemorations, showing the past clearly reflected in the present and making a significant contribution to the literature on the evangelization of New Spain. This is more than history—it is the rediscovery of performances that connected worlds.