Among the scholars who have most inspired my work as a political scientist are multiple historians—whether intellectual, legal, or religious.…
From Jefferson to Jeffersonian battles
democracy
Relativism and Religion: An introduction
Politicized religion seems to have a new enemy: Moral relativism is denounced by believers of all stripes as a threat…
Democracy as a work in progress rather than a work of progress
Let me begin by thanking the contributors to this book forum for their respective reviews. I am enormously grateful for…
Faithfully secular?
Community organizing is faith-based, at least in its best-known form. Since the 1940s, organizers in the mold of Saul Alinsky…
The challenges of “resurrecting democracy”: Lessons from London
Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life is a weighty call to “resurrect democracy” and to…
Revitalizing the power of the great in-between
In his thoughtful The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama argues that there are three pillars of order that are…
Democracy and the secular predicament
In the United States, the Middle East is almost always presented as a problem to be solved—most significantly, the problem…
Religion, Secularism, and Constitutional Democracy
Secularism has many critics in the academy these days, but not all have given up on it. This is made…
Is democracy the question?
Perhaps the most pertinent question to be asked of Egypt’s revolutionary/counter-revolutionary process in the past three years is this: how…
Electoral legitimacy, not religious legitimacy
The ouster of Mohamed Morsi involved a dispute over legitimacy—what gave the Egyptian president the right to remain in power?…