Crediting God
Subtitle: sovereignty and religion in the age of global capitalism
By: edited by Miguel Vatter
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9780823233199; 9780823233205; 9780823233212
Subjects: Religion and politics; Congresses; Globalization; Capitalism
Description: "Tocqueville suggested that the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe.This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological and political analysis. It has become more difficult to believe that humanity's progress necessarily leads to atheism, or that it is possible to translate all that is good about religion into reasonable terms acceptable in principle by all, believers as well as nonbelievers. And yet, the spread of Enlightenment values, of an independent public sphere, and of alternative projects of modernitycontinues unabated and is by no means the antithesis of the renewed vigor of religious beliefs.The essays in this book shed interdisciplinary and multicultural light on a hypothesis that helps to account for such an unexpected convergence of enlightenment and religion in our times: Religion has reentered the public sphere because it puts into question the relation between God and the concept of political sovereignty.In the first part, Religion and Polity-Building,new perspectives are brought to bear on the tension-ridden connection between theophany and state-building from the perspective of world religions. Globalized, neo-liberal capitalism has been another crucial factor in loosening the bond between God and the state, as the essays in the second part, The End of the Saeculum and Global Capitalism,show.The essays in the third part, Questioning Sovereignty: Law and Justice,are dedicated to a critique of the premises of political theology, starting from the possibility of a prior, perhaps deeper relation between democracy and theocracy. The book concludes with three innovative essays dedicated to examining Tocqueville in order to think the Religion of Democracybeyond the idea of civil religion." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Based on a conference held in May 2005 at Northwestern University.

Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Religion and polity-building. Religious freedom: preserving the salt of the earth / Fred Dallmayr; title: A new form of religious consciousness?: religion and politics in contemporary Muslim contexts / Abdou Filali-Ansary; title: A republic whose sovereign is the creator: the politics of the ban of representation / Shmuel Trigano; title: Confucianism's political implications for the contemporary world / Ranjoo Seodu Herr; title: Religion and the public sphere in Senegal: the evolution of a project of modernity / Souleymane Bachir Diagne; title: The end of the Saeculum and global capitalism. Should we be scared?: the return of the sacred and the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia / Georges Dreyfus; title: All nightmares back: dependency and independency theories, religion, capitalism, and global society / Hauke Brunkhorst; title: The evangelical-capitalist resonance machine / William E. Connolly; title: Questioning sovereignty: law and justice. "The war has not ended": Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and the paradoxes of countersovereignty / Freidrich Balke; title: Natural right and state of exception in Leo Strauss / Miguel Vatter; title: Law and the gift of justice / Samuel Weber; title: The religion of democracy: Tocqueville beyond civil religion. The religious situation in the United States 175 years after Toqueville / Jose Casanova; title: The avatars of religion in Tocqueville / Lucien Jaume; title: Publics, prosperity, and politics: the changing face of African American Christianity and Black political life / Eddie Glaude; title: Conversion / Thomas L. Dumm.