Abstract
Future historians will certainly notice that ours has been a period of unexpected, varied, and multiple resurgence of religion as a political force.1 This resurgence is not a universal phenomenon, but it is widespread and, in certain parts of the world, has become a dominant preoccupation of secular power-wielders. Whatever else is occurring, despite the continued ascendancy of science and technology, we are witnessing an extraordinary recovery of religious ways of understanding human experience.
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Notes
For a profound probing of this theme, see Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyō, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999);
see also Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
For a fictionalized and prophetic perspectives see Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (New York: Viking, 1971);
and Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (New York: Knopf, 1974).
For an excellent formulation of this turn from secularism and mainstream modernism, see William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
also helpful are Robert Coles, The Secular Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Who Are We? Critical Reflections and Human Possibilities (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans, 2000).
For a more drastic rendering of these themes, see William Irwin Thompson, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
For a general assessment, see Andrew Reding, “Seed of a New and Renewed Church: The ‘Ecclesiastical Insurrection’ in Nicaragua,” Monthly Review (July/August 1987): 24–55; also Andrew Reding, ed., Christianity and Revolution: Tomas Borge’s Theology of Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987). See also the statement by the National Directorate of the FSCN of October 7, 1980, “The Role of Religion in the New Nicaragua,” in Tomas Borge et al., Sandinistas Speak (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982). A useful firsthand account is Joll Millman, “Nicaragua’s Social Revolution Rests Largely on Scripture and Christian Base Communities,” In These Times (24 February–8 March 1988): 22, 112–13.
This focus is developed powerfully by Upendra Baxi in “Taking Suffering Seriously: Social Action Litigation Before the Supreme Court of India,” Delhi Law Review 91 (1979–80): 8–9.
See also Baxi’s Courage, Craft and Contention: The Indian Supreme Court in the Eighties (Bombay, India: N. M. Tripath, 1985).
See Anthony Amove, ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2000);
more generally see David Cartright and George A. Lopez, eds., The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
Cf. A.G. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985).
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam, 1979), pp. 8–10.
For ethical and legal rationales, see Christopher Stone, Earth and Other Ethics: The Case of Moral Pluralism (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
See Petra Kelly, Fighting for Hope (Boston: South End Press, 1984);
and Petra Kelly and Rudolf Bahro, Building the Green Movement (Philadelphia: New Society, 1986); see also the report of tension among the German Greens in Serge Schmemann, “For Germany’s Greens, Success Breeds a Schism,” New York Times, 11 October 1987, p. 22.
For a convenient summary of the Green perspective, see Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics (Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear and Co., 1986), pp. 78–82.
See Richard Shaull, Naming the Idols: Biblical Alternatives for U.S. Foreign Policy (Oak Park, IL: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988).
See Zsuzsa Hegedus, “The Challenge of the Peace Movement: Civilian Security and Civilian Emancipation,” in Towards a Just World Order, edited by Saul H. Mendlovitz and R. B. J. Walker (London: Butterworths, 1987), pp. 191–210.
For intriguing speculations along these lines with some scientific foundations, see J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
See my earlier essay, Richard Falk, “In Pursuit of the Postmodern,” in Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions, edited by David Ray Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 81–98; appearing in altered form in this volume as chapter 4.
The fundamentalist option can be considered an inappropriate religious awakening that is quite likely to present a major challenge in the years ahead, especially given the uncertainties associated with this multifaceted process of transition from modernism to postmodernism. For one line of creative response to this moment of unfolding possibilities, see William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light: Four Talks on the Future (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
The practical and theoretical implications of this conjoined vision are explored in R. B. J. Walker, One World/Many Worlds (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
One suggestive line of thinking is to be found in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000);
see also Richard Falk, Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for World Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992);
and Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Human Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
Among many accounts see Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).
Also, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ed., Global Futures: Shaping Globalization (London: Zed, 2000);
David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999);
and Hazel Henderson, Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999).
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© 2001 Richard Falk
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Falk, R. (2001). Religion and Politics: Verging on the Postmodern. In: Religion and Humane Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62975-6_5
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