Where Religion Meets Politics: Church, State and American History

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• published: 24 Dec 2009
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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/12/07/The_Great_Issues_Forum_Varieties_of_Nonbelief Susan Jacoby discusses the effects religion has had on American politics since the drafting of the Constitution. Denys Turner points out that despite America's formal separation of church and state, religion permeates politics to a greater degree than in Britain, where there is a government-sanctioned church. ----- Journalist Susan Jacoby, philosopher Colin McGinn, and theologian Denys Turner explore questions such as: Is humanism another kind of religion? Is it religion's evolutionary future, rather than just one of several alternatives? What light does the recent scientific study of religion throw on these possibilities? How do the new humanists compare to the new atheists? Can an atheist identity be shaped by a positive ethic, or must it be primarily an anti-religious sentiment? How will the persistence of belief and disbelief, as well as the tension between them, shape thought and culture in the 21st century? - CUNY Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature. Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby's other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. Denys Alan Turner is a British academic in the field of philosophy and theology. He is currently Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University having been appointed in 2005, previously having been Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from Oxford University. He has written widely on political theory and social theory in relation to Christian theology, as well as on Medieval thought, in particular, mystical theology.