Prophets versus Religiocrats

Abstract

If the enduring takeaway from R. Scoot Appleby’s important book Ambivalence of the Sacred is that religion can be good and bad, it is unfortunately a diminished lesson. This binary misses the more robust potential of Appleby’s legacy, which encompasses peace studies, policy, the global engagement with religion, and development theory. The bureaucratization of religion and the emergence of a sphere of “religiocrats” point to a failure to appreciate Appleby’s engagement with prophetic religiosity and religious action. Revisiting the theoretical foundations of Appleby illuminates this potential for expanding the scope of theory and practice of religion and global politics.

Keywords:

• fundamentalism
• religion and violence
• religion and peacebuilding
• religious literacy
• religion and neoliberalism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Atalia Omer

Atalia Omer is an Associate Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow working on a book tentatively titled Global Religion, Peacebuilding and the Perils of Development: Beyond Neoliberalism and Orientalism. She is the author of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2013). She is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-author (with Jason A. Springs) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2013).