Religion And Cooperation Between Civilizations

The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in today’s geopolitical climate—with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication in 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations pose the greatest threat to world peace, but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia have changed global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify inter-civilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. In his incisive analysis, Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world.

The "clash of civilizations" focuses on conflict and cooperation between and within states. Dealing with the clash is essential for a peaceful and harmonious world. The "clash of civilizations" is a topic of great interest around the world and constitutes an important dimension of religion and international relations. In the quarter century since Huntington first aired his controversial framework, inter-civilizational "clash" and "dialogue" have become mainstream issues both in international relations and in many Western countries' domestic concerns. The book examines a key question: how does Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" "paradigm" help explain current Western governments" responses to Muslim migration and related security issues? Understanding relations between the West/Westerners and Muslim-majority societies/Muslims is impossible without being aware that right-wing populist politicians in the West, as well as some policy makers and commentators, seem to view all Muslims in a malign way. This indicates a lack of willingness to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the mass of "moderate," "ordinary," and "peaceful" Muslims and, on the other hand, a small minority of Islamist extremists and even smaller number of Islamist terrorists. The result is a crucial topic of our times: how do different civilizations coexist in a small and increasingly congested planet without conflict? The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

This volume focuses on the constitutive politics of civilizational identity, examining the practices through which notions of civilizational identity are produced and reproduced in different contexts, including the global credit regime, modernity debates, and the "war on terrorism".

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

A groundbreaking account of how religion made society possible How did human societies scale up from tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today—even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"—the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths—spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization answer each other. Sincere faith in watchful Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, yet at the same time it introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. And in some parts of the world, societies with atheist majorities—some of the most cooperative and prosperous in the world—have climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions and helps us understand the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.

Are Muslims and Christians locked in mortal combat forever? Will ever-continuing jihads and crusades continue to cost the lives of millions and destroy once-beautiful cities? Must the Muslim-Christian clash of civilizations, which started almost 1,500 years ago, continue into the future? Not necessarily, argues Dr. Johnson. Within Islam, a serious reconsideration is underway, broadly parallel to the reconsideration of church-state relations that happened during the early and mid-twentieth century within Christianity. This is leading to a new form of orthodox Islam that is fully compatible with multi-religious global society and that can move beyond conflict toward real cooperation with Christians and adherents of other religions. But this reconsideration, called “Humanitarian Islam,” is still mostly found in Indonesia and is not yet well known in the rest of the world. It is time for Christians to develop extensive interaction and cooperation with Humanitarian Islam.

This book presents an interdisciplinary study of the role of spirituality and religious ritual in the emergence of complex societies. Involving an eminent group of natural scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians, this volume examines Çatalhöyük as a case study. A nine-thousand-year old town in central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first excavated in the 1960s and has since become integral to understanding the symbolic and ritual worlds of the early farmers and village-dwellers in the Middle East. It is thus an ideal location for exploring theories about the role of religion in early settled life. This book provides a unique overview of current debates concerning religion and its historical variations. Through exploration of themes including the integration of the spiritual and the material, the role of belief in religion, the cognitive bases for religion, and religion's social roles, this book situates the results from Çatalhöyük within a broader understanding of the Neolithic in the Middle East.