In 2017, I argued that the concepts of civil and political religions help explain contemporary sociopolitical developments in Russia and…
Revisited: Political religion and crises of legitimacy
political religion
A matter of life and death
Opening his chapter on “The Faith” of Bolshevism (chapter 3), Yuri Slezkine writes that “The most obvious question about [the]…
Bolshevism, Orthodoxy, and secularization in Russia
When I first heard about Yuri Slezkine’s new book, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, I…
The future of political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Egyptian politics
Shortly after the late Omar Suleiman, the Hosni Mubarak era head of Egypt’s military intelligence, had been appointed vice president…
Political Islam becomes less political
For the past few years, much of the scholarly literature on Islamist movements has danced around the “participation/ moderation” idea:…
Is sovereignty necessarily theological?
Paul Kahn's task, he says, is to describe and interpret, rather than demystify, America’s political theology. That political theology, he…