World Order and Religion

Edited by Wade Clark Roof

Subjects: Christianity
Series: SUNY series in Religion, Culture, and Society
Paperback : 9780791407400, 320 pages, September 1991
Hardcover : 9780791407394, 320 pages, October 1991
Out of print (Hardcover)

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Wade Clark Roof

Part I: General Considerations

1. International Realities: Bringing the Global Picture into Focus
Robert Wuthnow

2. Religious Elites in Advanced Capitalism: The Dialectic of Power and Marginality
James Davison Hunter and James E. Hawdon

Appendix to Chapter Two

Part II: Core and Periphery

3. Old Religions and New Religions: The Lessons of the Colonial Era
Ninian Smart

4. "God Damn Yanquis"—American Hegemony and Contemporary Latin American Christianity
Graham Howes

5. Liberation Theology: Its Implications for Latin American Politics and American Catholicism
Juan Carlos Navarro

6. Martin Luther King, Jr. , and the Third World
James H. Cone

Part III: Mission and Ideology

7. World Christianity, the Missionary Movement and the Ugly American
A. F. Walls

8. The Yogi and the Commissar: Christian Missions and the New World Order in Africa
Lamin Sanneh

9. World Order and Mainline Religions: The Case of Protestant Foreign Missions
Michael A. Burdick and Phillip E. Hammond

Part IV: American Religion and Civic Culture

10. A World Polity Interpretation of U. S. Religious Trends Since World War II
George M. Thomas

11. Globalization and Theology in America Today
Max L. Stackhouse

12. Realism, Just War, and the Witness of Peace
Jean Bethke Elshtain

Part V: Concluding Reflections

13. On Thinking about Systems: Some Implications for the Study of Religion in the World Order
W. Barnett Pearce

14. World Order and Religion: A Match Made in Heaven or a Marriage of Convenience?
Rhys H. Williams

Contributors

Index

Description

This book looks at religion from a global perspective and examines how religion is shaped by the larger set of political and economic relationships that make up today's world. Focusing mainly on Western religion and on the changing role of the United States in world affairs, the authors show how shifts in the hegemony of the United States is affecting religious and ideological trends. Attention is given particularly to the United States in relation to Latin America, South Africa, and the post-colonial world of China, Japan, and the Islamic states. This volume highlights the impact of greater global connectedness on the rise of new religious movements and changing patterns of establishment religion in the United States.

Wade Clark Roof is Professor of Religion and Society in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Community and Commitment: Religious Plausibility in a Liberal Protestant Church and American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future; and he is editor of Race and Residence in American Cities: Religion in America Today; and Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities.

Reviews

"Clearly, this is one of the hot topics across a variety of disciplines. Moreover, it is not just popular in the faddish sense, but it represents one of the truly seminal issues for scholars concerned with deciphering world trends and their meaning for peoples from first to third world nations. " — William R. Garrett, St. Michael's College