Michael D. Driessen – författare

Over the last thirty years, governments across the globe have formalized new relationships with religious communities through their domestic and foreign policies and have variously sought to manage, support, marginalize, and coopt religious forces through them. Many scholars view these policies as evidence of the "return of religion" to global politics although there is little consensus about the exact meaning, shape, or future of this political turn. In The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue, Michael D. Driessen examines the growth of state-sponsored interreligious dialogue initiatives in the Middle East and their use as a policy instrument for engaging with religious communities and ideas. Using a novel theoretical framework and drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Driessen explores both the history of interreligious dialogue and the evolution of theological approaches to religious pluralism in the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. He analyzes state-centric accounts of interreligious dialogue and conceptualizes new ideas and practices of citizenship, religious pluralism, and social solidarity that characterize dialogue initiatives in the region. To make his case, Driessen presents four studies of dialogue in the Middle East--the Focolare Community in Algeria, the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon, KAICIID of Saudi Arabia, and DICID of Qatar--and highlights key interreligious dialogue declarations produced in the broader Middle East over the last two decades. Compelling and nuanced, The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue illustrates how religion operates in contemporary global politics, offering important lessons about the development of alternative models of democracy, citizenship, and modernity.

Over the last thirty years, governments across the globe have formalized new relationships with religious communities through their domestic and foreign policies and have variously sought to manage, support, marginalize, and co-opt religious forces through them. Many scholars view these policies as evidence of the "return of religion" to global politics although there is little consensus about the exact meaning, shape, or future of this political turn. In The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue, Michael D. Driessen examines the growth of state-sponsored interreligious dialogue initiatives in the Middle East and their use as a policy instrument for engaging with religious communities and ideas. Using a novel theoretical framework and drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Driessen explores both the history of interreligious dialogue and the evolution of theological approaches to religious pluralism in the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. He analyzes state-centric accounts of interreligious dialogue and conceptualizes new ideas and practices of citizenship, religious pluralism, and social solidarity that characterize dialogue initiatives in the region. To make his case, Driessen presents four studies of dialogue in the Middle East--the Focolare Community in Algeria, the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon, KAICIID of Saudi Arabia, and DICID of Qatar--and highlights key interreligious dialogue declarations produced in the broader Middle East over the last two decades. Compelling and nuanced, The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue illustrates how religion operates in contemporary global politics, offering important lessons about the development of alternative models of democracy, citizenship, and modernity.

Religion and Democratization is a comparative study of how regime types and religion-state arrangements frame questions of religious and political identities in Muslim and Catholic societies. The book proposes a theory for modeling the dynamics of "religiously friendly democratization " processes in which states institutionally favor specific religious values and organizations and allow religious political parties to contest elections. Religiously friendly democratization has a transformative effect on both the democratic politics and religious life of society. As this book demonstrates, it affects the political goals of religious leaders and the political salience of the religious identities of religious individuals. In a religiously charged national setting, religiously friendly democratization can generate more support for democracy among religious actors. By embedding religious ideas and values into its institutions, however, it also mediates the effects of secularization on national religious markets, creating more favorable conditions for the emergence of public religions and new trajectories of religious life.The book anchors its theoretical claims in case studies of Italy and Algeria, integrating original qualitative evidence and statistical data on voters' political and religious attitudes. It also considers the dynamics of religiously friendly democratization across the Muslim world today, through a comparative analysis of Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia. Finally, the book examines the theory's wider relevance through a large-N quantitative analysis, employing cross-national databases on religion-state relationships created by Grim and Finke and Fox.