"What is a church and what work does "church"-the church-do today in American law? In Church State Corporation, Sullivan argues that the appeals to "the church" we find in legal opinions express what she calls a "Christian mystical political theology" that naturalizes religion in the American legal imagination and limits the law's ability to acknowledge religion more broadly. To pinpoint the work the church does in US law, Sullivan examines two recent Supreme Court cases, Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2012) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), in order to map the contours of the "church-shaped space" at the heart of what constitutes religion in US law. Sullivan also examines a constellation of church property cases, cases developing corporate personhood such as Citizens United, and what the "Angola Church"-a collection of churches formed within the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola-reveals about the range of the church's influence in US law. In all, the reader is treated to a remarkably thought-provoking analysis of the ways the church persists in US law, one that calls into question our basic assumptions about our supposedly secular age"--

Examines the histories of the US government, the Catholic Church, General Motors, and the European Union as examples of federated systems that centralized power.

Abortion. Physician-assisted suicide. Same-sex marriages. Embryonic stem-cell research. Poverty. Crime. What is a faithful Christian response? The God of the Bible is unquestionably a God of justice. Yet Christians have had their differences as to how human government and the church should bring about a just social order. Although Christians share many deep and significant theological convictions, differences that threaten to divide them have often surrounded the matter of how the church collectively and Christians individually ought to engage the public square. What is the mission of the church? What is the purpose of human government? How ought they to be related to each other? How should social injustice be redressed? The five noted contributors to this volume answer these questions from within their distinctive Christian theological traditions, as well as responding to the other four positions. Through the presentations and ensuing dialogue we come to see more clearly what the differences are, where their positions overlap and why they diverge. The contributors and the positions taken include Clarke E. Cochran: A Catholic Perspective Derek H. Davis: A Classical Separation Perspective Ronald J. Sider: An Anabaptist Perspective Corwin F. Smidt: A Principled Pluralist Perspective J. Philip Wogaman: A Social Justice Perspective This book will be instructive for anyone seeking to grasp the major Christian alternatives and desiring to pursue a faithful corporate and individual response to the social issues that face us.

Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu examine the relationship between religion and politics in ten former communist Eastern European countries, showing church-state relations in the new EU member states through study of political representation for church leaders, governmental subsidies, registration of religions by the state, and religious instruction in public schools.

The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.