Introduction: Politics, Religion and Political Theology: Historical and Contemporary Questions

Abstract

This volume had its origin in two lecture series hosted by the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University: one devoted to the issue of toleration and the other to varying appropriations of the notion of political theology. In the time since those series, the urgent and animating questions that connect these two important theologico-political conceptions—along with many relevant cognate notions, such as those of secularism and the post-secular, individual claims of conscientious conviction as well as the larger institutional frameworks within which such claims are articulated (church-state relations, the establishment of sharī‘a law, etc.)—have only gotten more pressing.