The American founders frequently alluded to and quoted from the Bible in their political rhetoric. This fact alone reveals little about how and for what purposes the founding generation used the Bible and, more important, how the Bible influenced the political thought of the founding era. Drawing on some of the most familiar political rhetoric of the founding era, this article examines the founders' diverse uses of the Bible in political discourse, ranging from the strictly literary and cultural to the theological, from the stylistic to the substantive. Recognition of these distinct uses is important insofar as it is misleading to read spiritual meaning into purely political or rhetorical uses of the Bible or vice versa.

Over the last decade the 80-million strong Anglican Communion has been increasingly divided, seemingly over the issue of sexuality. This article explores this conflict by focusing on the particular problems of resolving conflict when the divisions are a product of a growing ethical pluralism within the Church and the wider society. In particular, we locate the discussion within an emerging debate about the utility of “rules” in resolving conflict in an international community where cultural particularity challenges claims made for universal values. In the Anglican case, hope has been vested in a Covenant that is discussed in the second part of this article. The hope of Church leaders was that this particular set of rules would acquire not just formal consent but normative legitimacy, although by early 2010 it was far from clear that this had resolved the crisis.

John Rawls contended that an overlapping consensus for “political liberalism” could be found in different ways across the range of comprehensive systems of value in western societies. Three recent conflicts concerning the relationship of church and state in Canada involving the Catholic Bishop of Calgary, Frederick Henry, provide an opportunity to consider Rawls' ideas in a specific societal context. The first of these conflicts — Henry's call for the excommunication of Catholic Prime Minister Paul Martin for legalizing same-sex marriage — suggests that the resources for a Rawlsian overlapping consensus may be difficult to find in Catholicism. The refusal of the Calgary Catholic School Board to obey Henry's order to end the use of gambling related school fund-raising, the second of the Bishop's “travails,” undercuts that conclusion, but the moral emptiness of the vocabulary of cultural liberalism, which the Board deployed in its self-justifications, suggests that too much liberalism might be almost as regrettable as too little. Henry's third travail — a call before the Human Rights Commission to answer charges of “discriminatory public speech” for his public criticisms of homosexuality — suggests the merit of recognizing an alternative to overlapping consensus as the source of Catholic recognition of Rawlsian political liberalism: reciprocity.

Christianity and Danishness are mutually reinforcing phenomena in Denmark. Three factors applying specifically to Denmark explain this: first, the lack of national representative bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark; second, the journal Tidehverv (“New Era”) has nurtured a conservative and nationalistic Christian ethics among parts of the Danish clergy; and third, Danish politicians' abuse of the links between Christianity and Danishness as a tool in their anti-immigration strategies.

This article analyzes the emergence of female Islamist leaders in the Middle East and North Africa, and the glaring contradictions between their feminist views and their roles as political activists for the Islamic State. The two Islamist leaders who form the primary focus of this analysis are Zaynab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Nadia Yassine of Morocco's Justice and Charity Society. Our analysis reveals the existence of “Islamist feminism,” distinguished from broader secular-oriented Islamic feminism, as a logical, albeit unique, extension, and expression of Muslim anti-colonial discourse rooted in the intellectual currents of twentieth century independence movements that still resonate today.

Political realism is often seen as vulnerable to the “Machiavellian temptation,” that is, to the bracketing out of moral principles in the conduct of statecraft. In this article, I explore the use of Thomist themes in the writings of Martin Wight (1913–1972), a seminal figure of the so-called English School of international relations theory. Scholars have commented on the Christian realist roots of the English School, but it is little noted that Wight's most famous essay, “Western Values in International Relations,” uses the language of Thomism. By exploring the use of Thomist concepts in Wight's thought and the parallels to be found in the thought of his contemporary, Thomist political philosopher Jacques Maritain, I show how he seeks to escape the realist temptation to Machiavellianism. I then go on to sketch out the possible shortcomings of this approach.

In this article, we add to the evolving literature examining the importance of religious orientation and political elite behavior. We use data on the religious affiliations of United States House of Representative members to test the influence of religion on military funding for the “War on Terror.” Our findings indicate that, even after controlling for traditional political factors, such as ideology and partisanship, representatives' religious backgrounds often played a role in support for this bill. Roman Catholics, African-American Protestants, and those of other religions and the non-religious were more strongly opposed to funding for military intervention than mainline Protestants, even after controlling for other factors. This article provides a further look at the influence of religion and suggests that factors outside the traditional political dynamics may also be important in examining elite behaviors.