Statecraft and Salvation traces Wilson's New Democracyto liberal internationalism as an effort distinctly shaped by his faith.--Barry Hankins "Journal of Church and State"

Statecraft and Salvation traces Wilson's New Democracyto liberal internationalism as an effort distinctly shaped by his faith.--Barry Hankins "Journal of Church and State"

With a catastrophic fungal pandemic, the post-apocalypse, a moral quest despite societal breakdowns, humans hunting humans or morphed into grotesque infected, The Last of Us video games and HBO series have exhilarated, frightened, and broken the hearts of millions of gamers and viewers. The Last of Us and Theology: Violence, Ethics, Redemption? is a richly diverse and probing edited volume featuring essays from academics across the world to examine theological and ethical themes from The Last of Us universe. Divided into three groupings—Violence, Ethics, and Redemption?—these chapters will especially appeal to The Last of Us fans and those interested in Theology and Pop Culture more broadly. Chapters not only grapple with theologians, ethicists, and novelists like Cormac McCarthy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich; and theological issues from forgiveness and theodicy to soteriology and eschatology; but will help readers become experts on all things fireflies, clickers, Cordyceps, and Seraphites. “Save who you can save” and “Look for the Light.”

A unique reinterpretation of democracy that shows how history's most vocal champions of democracy from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls have contributed to a pervasive, anti-democratic ideology, effectively redefining democracy to mean "rule by the elites." The rise of global populism reveals a tension in Western thinking about democracy. Warnings about the "populist threat" to democracy and "authoritarian" populism are now commonplace. However, as Emily B. Finley argues in The Ideology of Democratism, dismissing "populism" as anti-democratic is highly problematic. In effect, such arguments essentially reject the actual popular will in favor of a purely theoretical and abstract "will of the people." She contends that the West has conceptualized democracy-not just its populist doppelgänger-as an ideal that has all of the features of a thoroughgoing political ideology which she labels "democratism." As she shows, this understanding of democracy, which constitutes an entire view of life and politics, has been and remains a powerful influence in America and leading Western European nations and their colonial satellites. Through a careful analysis of several of history's most vocal champions of democracy, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, John Rawls, and American neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, Finley identifies an interpretation of democracy that effectively transforms the meaning of "rule by the people" into nearly its opposite. Making use of democratic language and claiming to speak for the people, many politicians, philosophers, academics, and others advocate a more "complete" and "genuine" form of democracy that in practice has little regard for the actual popular will. A heterodox argument that challenges the prevailing consensus of what democracy is and what it is supposed be, The Ideology of Democratism offers a timely and comprehensive assessment of the features and thrust of this powerful new view of democracy that has enchanted the West.

Woodrow Wilson was easily one of the most religious presidents in American history. Yet, his religion has puzzled historians for decades. This book tells the story of Wilson's religion as he moved from the Calvinist orthodoxy of his youth to a progressive, spiritualized religion short on doctrine and long on morality.

Christianity, Politics, and the Predicament of Evil overcomes a defining divide in contemporary Protestant political ethics created by two contrasting conceptions of politics. The first, exemplified in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, construes politics as a matter of statecraft that utilizes the power of government to secure the greatest possible order and justice for society as a whole. The second, most prominently articulated by Stanley Hauerwas, maintains that politics concerns itself with the cultivation of virtue; consequently, it finds not the “well-ordered state” but the church to be the exemplar of politics. Not only illuminating the divide between politics-as-statecraft and politics-as-soulcraft but also redeveloping the conceptual space between them, this book reconceives politics within a theological framework in which the eschatological City of God, rather than the well-ordered state or the faithful church, functions as the paradigm of political life. At the same time, it simultaneously recognizes that the existence of evil, which corrupts individual wills and social structures, inhibits human beings from building the City of God in this world. Analyzing, criticizing, and drawing resources from Niebuhr and Hauerwas, as well as looking beyond to Augustine, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, this book specifies the respective roles of soulcraft and statecraft in a political ethic capable of guiding Christians as they witness to God’s eschatological intention to establish the City of God in a world currently mired in the predicament of evil.

It would seem unlikely that one could discover tolerant religious attitudes in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition, when enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was widespread and brutal. Yet this groundbreaking book does exactly that. Drawing on an enormous body of historical evidence—including records of the Inquisition itself—the historian Stuart Schwartz investigates the idea of religious tolerance and its evolution in the Hispanic world from 1500 to 1820. Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of common people rather than those of intellectual elites, the author finds that no small segment of the population believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Church. The book explores various sources of tolerant attitudes, the challenges that the New World presented to religious orthodoxy, the complex relations between “popular” and “learned” culture, and many related topics. The volume concludes with a discussion of the relativist ideas that were taking hold elsewhere in Europe during this era.