"For five thousand years the politician and the priest have been in the same business." In this provocative volume, Osho invites us to look through his microscope and examine not only the profound influence of religion and politics in society, but also its influence in our inner world. To the extent we have internalized and adopted as our own the values and belief systems of the “powers that be,” he says, we have boxed ourselves in, imprisoned ourselves, and tragically crippled our vision of what is possible. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, from the election of the first Black president in the United States to the appointment of a new pope who promises to use St. Francis of Assisi as a role model (following endless scandals involving child abuse) the roles of priests and politicians in our public life have recently captured the attention of our times, often just initiating another round of hope and subsequent disillusionment. In other words, wittingly or unwittingly, we keep digging ourselves deeper into the mess we are in. A new kind of world is possible — but only if we understand clearly how the old has functioned up to now. And, based on that understanding, take the responsibility and the courage to become a new kind of human being. "You have to be aware who the real criminals are. The problem is that those criminals are thought to be great leaders, sages, saints, mahatmas. So I have to expose all these people because they are the causes. For example, it is easier to understand that perhaps politicians are the causes of many problems: wars, murders, massacres, burning people. It is more difficult when it comes to religious leaders, because nobody has raised his hand against them. They have remained respectable for centuries, and as time goes on their respectability goes on growing. The most difficult job for me is to make you aware that these people — knowingly or unknowingly, that does not matter — have created this world."

Since Christianity is an ethical as well as a mystical religion and since individuals live in communities, the church is bound to be involved in politics and other social action that determines the quality of human life. So argues Trevor Beeson in this study of how the Church of England’s leaders responded to the radical social changes that transformed life in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their response was never prompt and rarely enthusiastic,and all too often the bishops resisted change in society as well as in the church. Nonetheless there were always a few prophets who recognised the need for reform and sometimes led the way to its realisation. Trevor Beeson traces the course of a fascinating period of history, starting from the time when church and state were bonded in an all-embracing unity, then moving through turbulent and and sometimes violent times in which the church struggled to discover a new vocation. Trevor Beeson analyses 18 key issues of the period in his usual robust style together with pen-portraits of the leading figures involved.. He ends with a critical evalualtion of the performances of some recent church leaders and outlines what he believes to be the appropriate basis for the intervention of bishops and other clergy in an increasingly secularised society that no longer recognises their authority. The duty to make pronouncements of Christian principle remains but these must normally point decision-makers in constructive directions rather than offering directives for the solutions of complex social and economic problems.

The prophets of the Old Testament were speaking, in the first instance, to the people of their own time. This means that we need to locate the prophets in the history of their own time, in order to understand them in the first instance. I propose to survey Israel’s history mainly in terms of the work and role of the prophets, from Moses to Malachi. Of course, they were interacting with the temple priesthood and with the disciples of Machiavelli, who cannot be left out of the story. God himself is in the background of this history, pursuing his purposes through these events and making his will known, which brings us back to the prophets. I’ve been a student of history since I was nine years old, a simple transition from an interest in maps. My mind itches, instinctively, to arrange things in chronological order. In fact, I was trying to synchronise the kings and prophets, for my own interest, while I was still at school. However, this will not be an academic work. My chief source of information will be the Old Testament itself. The story is told from a Christian viewpoint, or even a Protestant viewpoint, as will be evident from time to time. Yet faith will not be over-powering the critical spirit. The charioteer will be running these two horses as a team.

In Priest, Politician, Collaborator, James Mace Ward offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887–1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, however, refuses to reduce Tiso to a mere opportunist, portraying him also as a man of principle and a victim of international circumstances. This potent mix, combined with an almost epic ability to deny the consequences of his own actions, ultimately led to Tiso’s undoing. Tiso began his career as a fervent priest seeking to defend the church and pursue social justice within the Kingdom of Hungary. With the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the creation of a Czechoslovak Republic, these missions then fused with a parochial Slovak nationalist agenda, a complex process that is the core narrative of the book. Ward presents the strongest case yet for Tiso’s heavy responsibility in the Holocaust, crimes that he investigates as an outcome of the interplay between Tiso’s lifelong pattern of collaboration and the murderous international politics of Hitler’s Europe. To this day memories of Tiso divide opinion within Slovakia, burdening the country’s efforts to come to terms with its own history. As portrayed in this masterful biography, Tiso’s life not only illuminates the history of a small state but also supplies a missing piece of the larger puzzle that was interwar and wartime Europe.

The High Priests of American Politics offers an incisive look at how and why lawyers dominate legislatures in the United States and what impact, for better or worse, this dominance has on the broader governmental system.

In Argentina, more so than elsewhere, the church's educational objective is basic to understanding its position in politics. In a broader context, the church's secular activities stem from its traditional role in Catholic Latin America and are related to strategies of the military and political parties. This book examines in detail two of the most contentious issues in Argentine history: catechism in the public schools and recognition of private universities. Politicians, Pupils, and Priests is vital reading for anyone concerned with the destiny of democracy in Latin America and, especially, the politics of Third World countries.

The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.