Church & State in The Books Store

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.

Would you like to know what Billy Graham thinks about the most important issues of daily life? What about politics, presidents and terrorism? This book contains answers to questions many of us would ask Billy Graham if we had the good fortune to sit down with the person many call "America's Pastor". Best-selling author Bill Adler arranges topics from Graham's sermons, speeches, interviews, television appearances and writings in an easy to follow Q and A format.

Topics include Billy Graham on: Humor, Politics, Prayer, Technology and Religion, Race, Money, the Church, and Growing Older.

Hear Graham's responses to questions like

• What will heaven be like?
• Why does God bring on natural disasters?
• What do you think about the mixing of religion and politics?
• What do you say to an atheist who doesn't think there is a God?
• What is the greatest spiritual threat facing the United States?
• How can we achieve world peace?

Millions of Americans are outraged at the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies and even angrier that the nation's religious conservatives have touted these policies as representative of moral values. Why the Christian Right Is Wrong is a rousing manifesto that will ignite the collective conscience of all whose faith and values have been misrepresented by the Christian Right.

Praise for Why the Christian Right Is Wrong:

"In the pulpit, Robin Meyers is the new generation's Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, and Martin Luther King. In these pages, you will find a stirring message for our times, from a man who believes that God's love is universal, that the great Jewish prophets are as relevant now as in ancient times, and that the Jesus who drove the money changers from the Temple may yet inspire us to embrace justice and compassion as the soul of democracy. This is not a book for narrow sectarian minds; read it, and you will want to change the world."
—Bill Moyers

"In this book, a powerful and authentic religious voice from America's heartland holds up a mirror to the Bush administration and its religious allies. The result is a vision of Orwellian proportions in which values are inverted and violence, hatred, and bigotry are blessed by one known as 'The Prince of Peace,' who called us to love our enemies. If you treasure this country and tremble over its present direction, this book is a must-read!"
—John Shelby Spong author, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love

A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present.

Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place.

Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.