RELATED PUBLICATION
February 29, 2012
Rethinking Religion and World Affairs
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Religious Freedom Project
Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs has received a $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to support the interdisciplinary study of religious...
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AT THE CENTER
PROJECT LEADERS
Thomas Farr
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate...
Timothy Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and...
ASSOCIATE SCHOLARS
José Casanova
José Casanova is one of the world's top scholars in the sociology of religion. He is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown...
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she also has...
William Inboden
William Inboden is Assistant Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center for International...
David Novak
David Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the...
Daniel Philpott
Daniel Philpott is exploring Catholic and Protestant contributions to democracy from the years 1800-2000 for the Christianity and Freedom Project....
Mona Siddiqui
Mona Siddiqui, OBE is Professor of Islamic and Inter-religious Studies and Assistant Principal for Religion and Society at the University of...
Monica Duffy Toft
Monica Duffy Toft is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Initiative on Religion in...
Roger Trigg
Roger Trigg, of St Cross College, Oxford, is Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford, and a member of both the...
PROJECT STAFF
A.J. Nolte
A.J. Nolte joined the RFP at the beginning of October 2012, after two years as a research assistant at the Center for Complex Operations, National...
Kyle Vander Meulen
Kyle Vander Meulen joined the Berkley Center in January 2011. Before coming to the Center, he completed his master's studies in Divinity at the...
May 1, 2012
Rethinking Religion and World Affairs
The Berkley Center hosted the launch of an unprecedented new volume: Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (Oxford, 2012), edited by Timothy Shah, Alfred Stepan, and Monica Toft, and produced under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council through the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.
Too often steeped in a secularist mindset, academics, policy makers, and opinion shapers have only just begun to reckon with the varied impact of religion on global politics, society, media, gender issues, diplomacy, and economic development. Rethinking Religion and World Affairs documents how scholars, policy professionals, and journalists are now grappling with global religious dynamics and influences. The launch of the book featured the volume's editors as well as three of its contributors: Michael Barnett of George Washington University and Thomas Farr and Katherine Marshall, both of the Berkley Center. The panel asked: How much real progress has been made in "rethinking religion and world affairs" in the worlds of scholarship and policy making? And what further progress is needed, particularly in terms of new concepts, methods, and research agendas?
Too often steeped in a secularist mindset, academics, policy makers, and opinion shapers have only just begun to reckon with the varied impact of religion on global politics, society, media, gender issues, diplomacy, and economic development. Rethinking Religion and World Affairs documents how scholars, policy professionals, and journalists are now grappling with global religious dynamics and influences. The launch of the book featured the volume's editors as well as three of its contributors: Michael Barnett of George Washington University and Thomas Farr and Katherine Marshall, both of the Berkley Center. The panel asked: How much real progress has been made in "rethinking religion and world affairs" in the worlds of scholarship and policy making? And what further progress is needed, particularly in terms of new concepts, methods, and research agendas?
Featuring
Timothy Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious
Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World
Affairs and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government Department,
Georgetown University. He is a political scientist specializing in the relationship
between religion and political freedom in theory, history, and contemporary
practice. Shah is author, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott, of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton, 2011) and is editor of an Oxford University Press series on “Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South” that has so far generated three volumes. His articles on religion and global politics have appeared in Foreign Affairs,
Foreign Policy, the Journal of Democracy, the Review of Politics, and elsewhere.
Monica Duffy Toft
Monica Duffy Toft is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, summa cum laude. Professor Toft was a research intern at the RAND Corporation and served in the U.S. Army in southern Germany as a Russian linguist for four years. She was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies from 1999-2006. Her research interests include international relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning.
Alfred Stepan
Alfred Stepan is Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion and Wallace Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University. His current work focuses on religion and politics, and he is expanding his 2001 article “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the 'Twin Tolerations'” into a book. Stepan also works on the Pew-sponsored Arab Barometer. His other major publications include Crafting State Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (Spring 2011) with Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) with Juan Linz, and Arguing Comparative Politics (2001). He taught at Yale University for thirteen years, was the first Rector of Central European University, the Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls College, Oxford University, and Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Participants
Michael Barnett
Michael Barnett is a professor at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Barnett previously taught at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Macalester College, Wellesley College, and the Hebrew...
Thomas Farr
Full List of Publications
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Katherine Marshall
Katherine Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where she leads the Center's program on Religion and Global Development. After a long career in the development field, including several leadership...