Mark Amstutz offers a timely and insightful look at how Evangelicals have shaped America's role in the world and how they can best use their power without compromising their principles.

These four provocative and timely essays examine evangelical involvement with foreign policy-its history, current context, and dominant trends-in order to stimulate thinking on what the role of evangelicals should be. The authors point out the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, describe the dangers of the present, and offer insights for effectively influencing American foreign policy in the future.

This important work provides a comparison of the human rights policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations, developed through a general survey of these policies, a reliance on extensive interviewing and congressional hearings, and four case studies. The book deals first with the background of the human rights foreign policies of the two administrations, their conceptual frameworks, rationales, systems of priorities, the objectives they sought, and the selection of national situations to which the policies were applied. The survey then proceeds to identify and describe the sources of the policies, both legal political, international treaties and agreements, national legislation, and the bureaucracy and Congress. It also examines actions taken to implement the policies and diplomatic pressures and inducements. The case studies describe and compare the approaches of the two administrations to the human rights situations in South Africa, Chile, South Korea, and the Soviet Union.

William O. Chittick identifies three value orientations--security, economic, and community--that fundamentally shape U.S. foreign policy choices. Chittick argues that its not enough to look at only one of these dimensions--security, in the case of most traditional texts--or even one at a time. Instead, he makes a cogent and convincing case for the systematic study of all three and explains why privileging any one dimension over another leads to oversimplification and faulty decision making. Once students are shown how these value orientations work together in complex and interesting ways, they in turn can bring richer, more insightful analysis to the field. Chittick applies the books cohesive analytical framework throughout, covering the history of U.S. foreign policy as well as such contemporary issues as humanitarian interventions, global environmental problems, and international terrorism. He carefully weighs the criteria for different policy options and explores their utility: how effective are trade sanctions? What is the best way to pursue economic development in underdeveloped nations? This comprehensive overview of the policymaking process considers the many policy inputs--the foreign and domestic political, economic, and cultural factors that shape U.S. foreign policy outputs--from the perspective of the three dimensions.

Drawing on the work of leading scholars as well as policy makers and analysts, this volume offers the most comprehensive and accessible exploration to date of the major puzzles, issues, and questions surrounding the complex and increasingly visible role of religion in world affairs.

"The United States confronts today's world with a foreign policy that is neither consistent enough to be called a policy nor adequately responsive to foreign threats and opportunities. It is instead constructed in the marketplace of interests, and not ideas, that Washington has become. As a result, it is more likely to serve special interests rather than the national interest. This has come about because the end of the Cold War, globalization, and political partisanship have created a dysfunctional policy process. This book explores this change in U.S. foreign policy, examines the roles of the primary actors, ands assesses the potential for improvement."--Book cover.

This collection of essays from a special issue of American Quarterly explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that religion matters in contemporary public life. Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States offers a groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary conversation between scholars in American studies and religious studies. The contributors explore numerous modes through which religious faith has mobilized political action. They utilize a variety of definitions of politics, ranging from lobbying by religious leaders to the political impact of popular culture. Their work includes the political activities of a very diverse group of religious believers: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. In addition, the book explores the meanings of religion for people who might contest the term—those who are spiritual but not religious, for example, as well as activists who engage symbols of faith and community but who may not necessarily consider themselves members of a specific religion. Several essays also examine the meanings of secular identity, humanist politics, and the complex evocations of civil religion in American life. No other book on religion and politics includes anything like the diversity of religions, ethnicities, and topics that this one does—from Mormon political mobilization to attempts at Americanizing Muslims in the post-9/11 United States, from César Chávez to James Dobson, from interreligious cooperation and conflict over Darfur to the global politics surrounding the category of Hindus and South Asians in the United States.