Why Politics Can’t be Freed from Religion

Why Politics Can’t be Freed From Religion is an original, erudite, and timely new book from Ivan Strenski. It interrogates the central ideas and contexts behind religion, politics, and power, proposing an alternative way in which we should think about these issues in the twenty-first century. A timely and highly original contribution to debates about religion, politics and power - and how historic and social influences have prejudiced our understanding of these concepts, it proposes a new theoretical framework to think about what these ideas and institutions mean in today’s society. It applies this new perspective to a variety of real-world issues, including insights into suicide bombers in the Middle East. It includes radical critiques of the religious and political perspectives of thinkers such as Talal Asad and Michel Foucault. It dislodges our conventional thinking about politics and religion, and in doing so, helps make sense of the complexities of our twenty-first century world.