Theocratic Democracy

Theocratic Democracy PDF Author: Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199734860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy without a legal separation between religion and the state. An expert on the construction of social and moral problems, Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines more than 50 years of media-reported unconventional and deviant behaviour by the Haredi community.

Theocratic Democracy

Theocratic Democracy PDF Author: Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199734860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy without a legal separation between religion and the state. An expert on the construction of social and moral problems, Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines more than 50 years of media-reported unconventional and deviant behaviour by the Haredi community.

Eternal Hostility

Eternal Hostility PDF Author: Frederick Clarkson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
How should we respond to violence against abortion clinics and some of the lunatic, even comical pronouncements of individuals on the religious right? Frederick Clarkson makes it clear that behind the lone nuts who sometimes grace the headline news is a powerful and growing political movement. Drawing on years of rigorous research, Clarkson casts light on the wild card of the "theology of vigilantism" which urges the enforcement of "God's law.

Democracy in Iran

Democracy in Iran PDF Author: Misagh Parsa
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974298
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open. Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts. In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier PDF Author: Benjamin E. Park
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631494872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.

Constitutional Theocracy

Constitutional Theocracy PDF Author: Ran Hirschl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264452
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
At the intersection of two sweeping global trends—the rise of popular support for principles of theocratic governance and the spread of constitutionalism and judicial review—a new legal order has emerged: constitutional theocracy. It enshrines religion and its interlocutors as “a” or “the” source of legislation, and at the same time adheres to core ideals and practices of modern constitutionalism. A unique hybrid of apparently conflicting worldviews, values, and interests, constitutional theocracies thus offer an ideal setting—a “living laboratory” as it were—for studying constitutional law as a form of politics by other means. In this book, Ran Hirschl undertakes a rigorous comparative analysis of religion-and-state jurisprudence from dozens of countries worldwide to explore the evolving role of constitutional law and courts in a non-secularist world. Counterintuitively, Hirschl argues that the constitutional enshrinement of religion is a rational, prudent strategy that allows opponents of theocratic governance to talk the religious talk without walking most of what they regard as theocracy’s unappealing, costly walk. Many of the jurisdictional, enforcement, and cooptation advantages that gave religious legal regimes an edge in the pre-modern era, are now aiding the modern state and its laws in its effort to contain religion. The “constitutional” in a constitutional theocracy thus fulfills the same restricting function it carries out in a constitutional democracy: it brings theocratic governance under check and assigns to constitutional law and courts the task of a bulwark against the threat of radical religion.

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt PDF Author: Paul Edward Gottfried
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried’s examination of Western managerial government’s growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West’s relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entitlements and fulfill the other material programs of older welfare regimes, they have ceased to make qualitative leaps in the direction of social democracy. For the new political elite, nationalization and income redistributions have become less significant than controlling the speech and thought of democratic citizens. An escalating hostility toward the bourgeois Christian past, explicit or at least implicit in the policies undertaken by the West and urged by the media, is characteristic of what Gottfried labels an emerging “therapeutic” state. For Gottfried, acceptance of an intrusive political correctness has transformed the religious consciousness of Western, particularly Protestant, society. The casting of “true” Christianity as a religion of sensitivity only toward victims has created a precondition for extensive social engineering. Gottfried examines late-twentieth-century liberal Christianity as the promoter of the politics of guilt. Metaphysical guilt has been transformed into self-abasement in relation to the “suffering just” identified with racial, cultural, and lifestyle minorities. Unlike earlier proponents of religious liberalism, the therapeutic statists oppose anything, including empirical knowledge, that impedes the expression of social and cultural guilt in an effort to raise the self-esteem of designated victims. Equally troubling to Gottfried is the growth of an American empire that is influencing European values and fashions. Europeans have begun, he says, to embrace the multicultural movement that originated with American liberal Protestantism’s emphasis on diversity as essential for democracy. He sees Europeans bringing authoritarian zeal to enforcing ideas and behavior imported from the United States. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends the arguments of the author’s earlier After Liberalism. Whether one challenges or supports Gottfried’s conclusions, all will profit from a careful reading of this latest diagnosis of the American condition.

American Theocracy

American Theocracy PDF Author: Kevin Phillips
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218843
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
An explosive examination of the coalition of forces that threatens the nation, from the bestselling author of American Dynasty In his two most recent bestselling books, American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips established himself as a powerful critic of the political and economic forces that rule—and imperil—the United States, tracing the ever more alarming path of the emerging Republican majority’s rise to power. Now Phillips takes an uncompromising view of the current age of global overreach, fundamentalist religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning debt under the GOP majority. With an eye to the past and a searing vision of the future, Phillips confirms what too many Americans are still unwilling to admit about the depth of our misgovernment.

Democracy’s Discontent

Democracy’s Discontent PDF Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287444
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy

The Invention of Jewish Theocracy PDF Author: Alexander Kaye
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190922745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Invention of Jewish Theocracy explains why the idea of halakhic state - a demand that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah - emerged, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking a schism between secular politics and religious fundamentalism. The book engages with contemporary debates on global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflict, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism.

Theocracy

Theocracy PDF Author: Tish Davidson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1422294609
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Historically, theocracy has been a fairly rare form of government. Still, theocracies have appeared all over the globe, and they have taken a variety of forms. This book examines theocratic governments, from ancient Egypt to present-day Iran. It explores how different theocracies arose, how their leaders maintained authority, and what it was like for ordinary people living under religious rule. Theocracy will provide students with a wealth of fascinating and thought-provoking information.