PREFACEcial critique and cultural exchange. Yet such an ambitious assertion poses more questions
than it answers. In what precise ways do the claims of religious belief—concerning words
and gestures, powers and things—exert pressure on structures of governance? What im-
plications do theologically imbued justifications of substate and interstate violence—that
is, of terror and ‘‘just war’’—have for the credibility of religious traditions in much-
needed attempts to reshape patterns of representation and structures of authority, social
cohesion and cultural integration? Do the teachings of the world’s faith traditions a priori
support or undermine the political institutions and economic markets that arise through
globalization (or that enabled it to take on massive proportions)?^3 Can the resurgent
interest in ‘‘political theologies’’ offer any insights to the scholarly approaches now being
employed to examine globalization’s historical and contemporary effects?
These questions, and others following from them, were debated during a three-day
conference entitled Political Theologies: Globalization and Post-Secular Reason, in Am-
sterdam in June 2004. This gathering was the culmination of a collaboration between the
Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at the Divinity School of Harvard Uni-
versity and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Am-
sterdam. Lawrence E. Sullivan (at the time Director of CSWR) and Hent de Vries (at the
time Director of ASCA) headed the project, and it was jointly funded by the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the CSWR, and ASCA. The 2004 gathering
built upon two preceding conferences from the same project—in Amsterdam in June
2001 and at Harvard in May 2003. The present volume offers a selection from the papers
read and discussed during the three conferences, as well as essays solicited afterward in
order to strengthen its overall historical and analytical breath and the depth of its com-
bined perspectives.
When this collaborative effort was first discussed, in 1997–98,political theologywas a
term seldom heard in the wider academic debate, beyond historical references to the
writings of Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, and ‘‘theologies of liberation.’’ In the years
since September 11, 2001, however, the concept has become so relevant a focus of interest
that similar conferences have blossomed at other universities. The present volume will,
we hope, widen the number of people who can benefit from the research and ideas de-
bated during the conferences. Given the range of the questions brought up and left open,
it should both resonate with other collective interdisciplinary endeavors that have long
been underway and offer correctives and directions to the wave of more recent interest in
the domains of religion and the political.^4
We would like to thank our host institutions, the University of Amsterdam and Har-
vard University, as well as NWO, for their generous support. We would like to extend a
special word of gratitude to Dr. Eloe Kingma, Managing Director of ASCA, Mark D. W.
Edington, at the time Senior Administrator at the CSWR, who drafted a memo on whose
wording we have freely drawn for this preface, and Rebecca E. Kline, the CSWR’s Events
Coordinator. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Johns Hop-
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