The attentive reader will have surely noticed that one of my most passionate intellectual concerns, dealt with in my contributions to Ovi magazine, over a span of some ten years, is that of “the nexus between religion and democracy,” or more generally, religion and politics.
I am pleased to announce to the readership interested in and following such a theme, that a work in progress, which will come to fruition within a few more months is a gathering of those essays on the same theme in the form of a hard-cover book 200 pages (a total of some 35 essays), to be published and marketed by Nova Publishers of New York.
I would also like to thank Ovi magazine and its editorial staff for publishing those essays soon to appear as a book.
The targeted book’s audience will be similar to that of Ovi: the educated non-expert interested in the destiny of Western Civilization in the 21st century and the religious-political implications of the interface between democracy and spirituality, a time when both liberal democracy and religion appear to be progressively vanishing in the West. It will address frontally a question repeatedly enunciated and explored in Ovi: is there still a place for public religious expression with a democratic secular polity such as the EU or the US?
As a whole, the book will attempt to offer a fresh new perspective onthe perennial theme of the interface of democracy myth and religion explored by a variety of scholars in the last two thousand years and going back to Plato’s and Vico’s speculation on the subject of the poetical and the rational.
The book will peruse timely crucial issues such as free speech, bias against religion, religion and cultural identity, revolutions and fanaticism, Democracy and Orthodoxy in Russia, the grand narrative as an instrument of policy, spiritual values and secular values, terrorism and faith, ideology and religion, multiple modernities, the proper and inappropriate mixing of politics and religion, secular and religious humanism, religion and mythology, freedom human rights and faith, the Judeo-Christian heritage vs. secularism, positivism and the liberal tradition, the religious imagination vs. modernity and secularism, the politics of religion in Russia and elsewhere, Bannon and White Supremacy at the White House, the Caligula presidency, power without moral compass, the philosophical challenge of the Western ethical tradition, Pope Francis and Steve Bannon’s view of Christianity and Politics. These are themes that are being debated as we speak and are perceived vital for the very survival of our democratic way of life.
The book attempts a sweeping panoramic cultural, anthropological view of the theme democracy/religion, in some way connected to the following philosophical conundrums: myth/history, poetical/scientific, political/transcendent, freedom/determinism, ideological/historical, power/justice, law/love, grand narrative/positivistic, hermeneutics, transcendence/immanence, secular/religious, liberal/fascist, freedom/human rights, revelation/positivism, democracy/political corruption, moral compass/power, guilt/honor, democracy/honoring truth, ethical tradition/historical, secular/religious humanism, public/private spirituality, spiritual identity/political identity.
All of the above mentioned subthemes are alluded to in the very titles of the essays and then philosophically explored. The book will also venture in uncharted territory challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about history, progress, science, the secular and the sacred. The goal is not so much to solve those perennially thorny conundrums but to point to their relevancy and universality, in order to get some effective handle on our varied contemporary existential predicaments in politics, environmental science, and spirituality.
As mentioned, while the targeted audience is the educated layman of a philosophical bent, it is hoped that the book will also appeal to those who are concerned with contemporary trends in ethics, politics, spirituality and politics. I hope you’ll read it in the near future.
The Ovi 