This book provides a comparative, interdisciplinary analysis of the invocation and interaction of religious and national assertions in sacralizing local and global politics.

"The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist" is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossoli?ski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossoli?ski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This book provides an original concept of authenticity to illuminate the transformation of Christian consciousness in the increasingly more secular and pluralistic culture of Western societies. The present work is unique in offering an in-depth study of Simmel’s sociology and philosophy in dialogue with an ethnographic account of contemporary Christians. It develops original concepts drawing on Simmel’s writings on individuality and religion and connecting them with classical and contemporary scholarship in sociology and philosophy. The theoretical framework is illustrated through an analysis of the narratives and practices of Christians in an evangelical church in the UK and several New Monastic communities in the UK, US, and Canada. The book proposes an understanding of belief as relational and experiential and a concept of authenticity, as self-transcendence articulated in dialogue with religious tradition and the Other. Religious tradition is developed through an on-going process of interpretation and sacralization of what is considered within and without the tradition’s boundaries. The book also proposes an innovative approach to the study of morality by distinguishing between a people-centered ethic (ethic of compassion) and a norm-centered ethic (ethic of purity) to account for the the different ways in which Christians engage with the Other. This allows an exploration of the relationship between ethics and the making and breaking of boundaries in a given community. The case studies in this book show that committed Christians attempt to reconcile commitment to their tradition with the value of inclusiveness and to affirm their moral and religious identity as a distinctive moral lifestyle, not superior, but of equal worth to those of non-Christians.

The success of fascist and communist regimes has long been explained by their ability to turn political ideology into a type of religion. These innovative essays explore the notion that all forms of modern mass-politics, including democracies, need a form of sacralization to function.

The situation of Christians in the Middle East has become an important topic of international discussion as well as an important theme covered in the media, as several CBS Sixty Minutes programs have highlighted the plight of Christians in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. In the Eye of the Storm tells the story of the plight of twenty-first-century Middle Eastern Christians in five countries (Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt) in the context of the so-called Arab Spring and within a destabilized region that is a geopolitical triangle shaped by Israeli hegemony and Arab-Iranian tensions. The book places the situation of the Christians within the wider sociopolitical context of the Middle East in the twenty-first century. A unique feature of this book is that it is written mainly by native Christians who have spent their entire lives in the region and continue to live there. In the Eye of the Storm, therefore, provides an insider perspective rather than a hegemonic and colonial outsider perspective. This book hopes to offer a sociopolitical framework for the Christians of the Middle East, thus allowing them to tell their own story as they see it and not one that has been projected onto them by outside forces.

While Western Europe is widely considered to be the most secularized region of the world, José Pedro Zúquete asserts that, in certain cases, intense religion has manifested itself outside the church through political channels. The sacralization of politics is commonly studied in terms of movements and regimes of the past. Offering an innovative political analysis, Zuquette focuses on contemporary movements, developing the term “missionary politics.” The author focuses on Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France, assessing the literature, rhetoric, imagery, and patterns of charismatic control of these movements. Drawing upon interviews, extensive fieldwork, and abundant primary sources, Zúquete identifies the ways in which these political movements provide members with a sense that the nation is sacred and that its people have been divinely chosen.

Emilio Gentile, an internationally renowned authority on fascism and totalitarianism, argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, claiming as its own the prerogative of defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. Secular political entities such as the nation, the state, race, class, and the party became the focus of myths, rituals, and commandments and gradually became objects of faith, loyalty, and reverence. Gentile examines this "sacralization of politics," as he defines it, both historically and theoretically, seeking to identify the different ways in which political regimes as diverse as fascism, communism, and liberal democracy have ultimately depended, like religions, on faith, myths, rites, and symbols. Gentile maintains that the sacralization of politics as a modern phenomenon is distinct from the politicization of religion that has arisen from militant religious fundamentalism. Sacralized politics may be democratic, in the form of a civil religion, or it may be totalitarian, in the form of a political religion. Using this conceptual distinction, and moving from America to Europe, and from Africa to Asia, Gentile presents a unique comparative history of civil and political religions from the American and French Revolutions, through nationalism and socialism, democracy and totalitarianism, fascism and communism, up to the present day. It is also a fascinating book for understanding the sacralization of politics after 9/11.

This is one of four volumes on the Declaration of Independence. Formatted in 365 essays of about 400 words each, Rolwing examines nearly all the major writers on our Basic Charter, most of whom repudiate it. He focuses on their manifold criticisms and rejections, reveals their multiple distortions and misunderstandings, rebukes their self-contradictions and inconsistencies, and pities their general theo-phobia. He argues that while America was Founded almost completely by Protestant Christians (the only two "deists" were not even "deists"), what was Founded was formally only a philosophical product, not a faith based or Christian one, although the philosophy had been more Catholic than Protestant. Rolwing makes a great deal of American history, law, ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology easily accessible to the average reader. Each 5 minute essay can give you a high for the whole day. "Certainly the Declaration is worth many an hour explaining and defending it. Mr. Rolwing seeks to make the problems brought up about the document capable of being understood by both scholar and ordinary citizen." Fr. James Schall, S.J.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations synthesizes and extends existing research on ethics in organizations by explicitly focusing on ‘ethico-politics’ - where ethics informs political action. It draws connections between ethics and politics in and around organizations and the workplace, examines cutting-edge areas and sets the scene for future research. Through a wealth of international and multidisciplinary contributions this volume considers the broad range of ways in which ethics and politics can be conceived and understood. The chapters look at various ethical traditions, as well as the discursive deployment of ethical terminology in organizational settings, and they also examine large scale political structures and processes and how they relate to different forms of politics which affect behaviour in organizations. These many possibilities are united by a focus on how ethics can be used to inform and justify the exercise of power in organizations. This collection will be a valuable reference source for students and researchers across the disciplines of organizational studies, ethics and politics.

Prompted by the shattering of the bonds between religion and the political order brought about by the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau devised a “new” religion (civil religion) to be used by the state as a way of enforcing civic unity. Emile Durkheim, by contrast, conceived civil religion to be a spontaneous phenomenon arising from society itself — a non-coercive force expressing the self-identify or self-definition of a people. In 1967, the American sociologist Robert Bellah rediscovered the concept and applied it to American society in its Durkheimian form. Ever since Bellah’s publication, most authors have sought to explain civil religion in terms of an alleged “spontaneous” integrative role for society. They have emphasized the religious and cultural dimension of the concept, but failed to give due consideration to its political-ideological foundations. Thus, the coercive potential of civil religion has received little attention or has been wrongly relegated to Third World countries. Cristi provides a critique of the civil religion thesis, and identifies the most basic deficiencies of literature on this topic. By contrasting Bellah’s Durkheimian conception with Rousseau’s original formulation, the author discloses the dubious conceptual and empirical basis of the former. She demonstrates the need to rethink Bellah’s thesis in the light of a reinterpretation of Rousseau’s and Durkheim’s classical approaches, and substantiates her critique with a brief comparative survey of state-directed civil religions, and with an informative case study of civil religion in Pinochet’s Chile.