After September 11, 2001, ordinary citizens faced a new world ruled by political and religious machinations against the threat of terrorism. While political leaders pursued a policy of militarism, many religious leaders advocated pacifism. Ronald H. Stone advocates a middle road between these two extremes, what he calls prophetic realism. Taking up Reinhold Niebuhr's notion of Christian realism, Stone argues that our current situation calls for hard answers to hard questions. Stone offers compelling evidence that Jesus provides the prophetic model of our interaction with our enemies. This book will change people's minds about the relationship of religion and politics in the contemporary world.

According to current polls, about 85 percent of Americans identify with some religious faith and more than 40 percent say they attend religious services at least once a week. In recent years, religious observance—and even religious belief—have become important factors influencing voter choice. Active participation in electoral politics by some religious groups has fueled apprehensions that the traditional separation of church and state may be threatened. A. James Reichley explores the questions and conflicting positions surrounding the relations between government and politics in a new book that draws upon his landmark work, Religion in American Public Life. In Faith in Politics, Reichley explores the history of religion in American public life, and considers some practical and philosophic questions affecting future participation by religious groups in the formation of public policy. Reichley begins by examining the various attitudes and points of view of strict separationists, liberal social activists, moderate accommodationists, and direct interventionists. He goes on to discuss the way religion and politics relate to each other through a theoretic structure of seven value systems: monism, absolutism, ecstacism, egoism, collectivism, civil humanism, and transcendent idealism. Further chapters examine the trends and constitutional arrangements that developed during the formative years of the American Republic; the evolution of judicial interpretations of the free exercise and establishment clauses; and the history of church involvement in politics from the early years of the Republic to the 2000 election and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. A chapter covering events and developments from 1986 to 2002 includes accounts of political activism by the African American church, ideological divisions among Roman Catholics, Jewish liberalism and commitment to Israel, the rise and decline of the religious right, and political differences

"Was the John Foster Dulles who personified the Cold War as U.S. secretary of state in the 1950s the same man who denounced narrow nationalism as a leader of worldwide ecumenism and liberal Protestantism in the 1930s? In this remarkable study Mark Toulouse documents the 'transformation' of Dulles 'from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism,' overturning misconceptions of those historians who have tended to read Dulles's early years backward from what they know of him as secretary of sate. Christian missions and international diplomacy shaped John Foster Dulles from childhood. His father was a liberal Presbyterian minister; one grandfather had been a missionary to India, while the other had served as U.S. secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, and an uncle would serve Woodrow Wilson in the same office. As a Princeton undergraduate Dulles accompanied his grandfather to an international peace conference at The Hadue in 1907, where he became a secretary to the Chinese delegation. That experience, and a year at the Sorbonne, pointed Dulles toward international law rather than the ministry. But he remained an active, ecumenically minded Presbyterian lay leader, serving in several important denominational posts. He successfully defended the the controversial Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry P. Van Dusen before the Presbyterian General Assembly when fundamentalists attempted to depose them. In 1921 Dulles was appointed to the newly formed Commission on International Justice and Goodwill of the Federal Council of Churches. Dulles emerged as an international leader in 1937 at the ecumenical Oxford conference on life and work. Convinced in his discussions there of the ned to translate his inherited 'spiritual values' into practical international diplomacy, Dulles organized and became chairman of the Federal Council's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace. Through the years of world war and as a participant in the United Nations Conference in 1945, Dulles sought a peace that would transcend the narrow concerns of nationalism and political ideology. But after 1945, as Professor Toulous shows, the 'prophetic realism' that had guided Dulles's ecumenical quest for world peace and justice became a 'priestly nationalism' that uncompromisingly pursued the international political aims of the United States in the name of a 'supreme moral law.' Toulouse's incisive analysis of that 'transformation' is compelling reading for scholars of international diplomacy and American religion, and for every person who seeks to reconcile the imperatives of religion with the necessities of statecraft" --

"This collection of writings, drawn from a wide variety of sources, reveals the intellectual depth and breadth of the author. The articles include political commentary, cultural critique, literary analysis, extended book reviews, and even a short story by West. All of these are held together by a prophetic Afro-American Christian perspective. The value of this book is that it provides easy access to a significant selection of the author's corpus." --Religious Studies Review (October 1989) "This volume collects over 50 articles, book reviews, and addresses by a Union Seminary theologian . . . . The most eloquent pieces are those in which West explains and interprets his more personally felt tradition of Afro-American Protestantism." -- Library Journal