Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty

Religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have rationalised their governance and marked out their sovereignty – as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. The authors of this volume provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served the ends of modern government.

Trevor Stack, PhD (2002), University of Pennsylvania, directs the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen, where he is also Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. He has publishedKnowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (University of New Mexico, 2012) and is completing a second monograph titled Citizens: An Ethnographic Profile.Naomi Goldenberg PhD (1976), Yale University, is Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her publications include:Resurrecting the Body: Feminism, Religion and Psychoanalysis (Crossroad, 1993) andChanging of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Beacon, 1979).Timothy Fitzgerald PhD (1983), University of London, is Reader in Religion at the University of Stirling. He is the author ofThe Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford, 2000), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford, 2007), andReligion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (Continuum, 2011).Contributors are: Maria Birnbaum, Brian Brock, Geraldine Finn, Timothy Fitzgerald, Naomi Goldenberg, Jeffrey Israel, David Liu, Arvind-Pal Mandair, Per-Erik Nilsson, Suzanne Owen, Trevor Stack, Teemu Taira, and Tisa Wenger.