Critical religion and critical research on religion: Religion and politics as modern fictions

Abstract

The purpose of this response piece is to summarize what is meant by “critical religion” as a contribution to the ongoing debates within the discipline, and specifically in relation to critical research on religion.

Keywords

Critical religion politics

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Benjamin W (1921) Capitalism as religion. In: Selected Writings (vol. 1). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard Press, pp.288–291.

Berger, P (ed.) (1999) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington DC: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Berlin I (1969) John Stuart Mill and the ends of life. In: Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.173.

Berman

(2009) Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Blair T (2010) Christopher Hitchens vs Tony Blair Debate: Is Religion A Force For Good In The World? A Munk debate, Toronto, in association with the BBC, 13 December, 2010. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wv3vt; also available on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddsz9XbhrYA (accessed 19 September 2015).

Bosco

(2009) Persistent orientalisms: The concept of religion in international relations. Journal of International Relations and Development 12: 90–111.

Cantillon R (1755; 1730) Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General) [trans] Henry Higgs, (1959) Also titled as An Essay on Economic Theory, The Online Library of Liberty, https://liberty.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Cantillon-EssayOnEconomicTheory.pdf (accessed 16 October 2015).

Carrette

King

(2005) Selling Spirituality, London: Routledge.

Cavanaugh

(2009) The Myth of Religious Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

Chomsky

McChesney

(1999) Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order, New York: Seven Stories Press.

11.

Cox

(2007) Secularizing the land: The impact of the Alaska native claims settlement act on indigenous understandings of land. In: Fitzgerald

(ed.) Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, London: Equinox, pp. 71–92.

12.

Fitzgerald

(2000) The Ideology of Religious Studies, New York: Oxford University Press.

13.

Fitzgerald T (ed) (2007a) Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. London: Equinox.

14.

Fitzgerald

(2007b) Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories, New York: Oxford University Press.

15.

Fitzgerald

(2011) Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth, London: Bloomsbury.

16.

Fitzgerald

(2015a) Postcolonial remains: Critical religion, postcolonial theory, and deconstructing modern categories. In: Singh

Kim

(eds) The Postcolonial World, London: Routledge.

17.

Fitzgerald

(2015b) ‘Nations Under God: The Geopolitics of Faith in the 21st Century’: Problems of meaning in contemporary rhetoric. In: Luke

McKay

Haynes

(eds) Nations Under God: The Geopolitics of Faith in the 21st Century, Bristol: e-International Relations.Available at: www.e-ir.info/2015/08/26/edited-collection-nations-under-god-the-geopolitics-of-faith-in-the-21st-century/ (accessed 10 October 2015).

18.

Friedman

(1962) Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

19.

Goldstein WS, Boer R, King R, and Boyarin J (2015) How can mainstream approaches become more critical? Critical Research on Religion 3(1): 3--12.

20.

Goodchild

(2002) Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, London: Routledge.

21.

Harvey

(2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

22.

Harvey

(2010) A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso.

23.

Hayek

(1944) The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge.

24.

Hayek

(1949/1976) Individualism and Economic Order, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

25.

Helm T (2014) Extremist religion is at root of 21st-century wars, says Tony Blair. Guardian, 25 January, 2014.

26.

Hitchens

(2007) God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

27.

Isomae J (2007) In: Fitzgerald (ed.), pp.93--102.

28.

Juergensmeyer M (1993) The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism confronts the Secular State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

29.

Juergensmeyer

(2000) Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Berkeley: University of California Press.

30.

Juergensmeyer M (2004) ‘Is religion the problem?’ Paper 21, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n92c45q (accessed 21 September 2015).

31.

Klein

(2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Penguin Random House.

32.

Lasswell

(1936) Politics: Who Gets What When and How, New York: Whittesley House.

33.

Linklater

(2013) Owning the Earth: the Transforming History of Land Ownership, London: Bloomsbury.

34.

Liu

(2015) The ancestral, the religiopolitical. In: Stack

Goldenberg

Fitzgerald

(eds) Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, Leiden: Brill, pp. 143–181.

35.

Locke J (1689) A Letter Concerning Toleration. Available at: www.constitution.org/jl/tolerati.htm (accessed 21 September 2015).

36.

Locke J (1690) The Second Treatise on Government (chap. 5 ‘On Property’). Available at: www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtr05.txt (accessed 10 October 2015).

37.

Loy

(1997) The religion of the market. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65(2): 275–290.

38.

Macpherson

(1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

39.

Nelson

(2006) Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

40.

Penn W (1680) The Great Question to be Considered by the King...How far Religion is concerned in Policy or Civil Government, and Policy in Religion? Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland.

41.

Petito F and Hatzopolous P (eds) Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

42.

Purchas S (1626/1613) Purchas, His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed.

43.

Rothbard MN (2010) Richard Cantillon: The Founding Father of Modern Economics. Ludwig von Mises Institute (Dec. 16): http://mises.org/daily/4810/ (accessed 20 August 2014). [Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. In: Vol I: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith.].

44.

Schwartzman M (2014) What if religion isn’t special? In: Virginia School of Law: Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1992090 (accessed on 20 August 2014).

45.

Shah A (2014) Religion and the Secular Left: subaltern studies, Birsa Munda and Maoists. Anthropology of this Century (9). Available at: http://aotcpress.com/articles/religion-secular-left-subaltern-studies-birsa-munda-maoists/.

46.

Stack

Goldenberg

Fitzgerald

(2015) Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, Leiden: Brill.

47.

Smith

. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1993/1776Oxford: Oxford University Press.

48.

Von Stuckrad

(2013) Discursive study of religion: Approaches, definitions, implications. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25(1): 5–25.