Faith and the Intellectual Firmament of Foreign Affairs
Dennis Hoover Thursday, 4 June 2009
The odds have long been difficult for those trying to get foreign affairs elites to devote serious attention to religion. The reasons are many.
One problem is that many scholars and practitioners of international relations have not received even basic, much less specialized, education about religion and religion-related issues. Another is that, in some quarters of the foreign affairs establishment, ignorance is compounded by outright secularist bias—namely, the sentiment that religion is inevitably a regressive and irrational force in pubic life, one best constrained to as small a sphere of influence as possible. Still another problem that pervades the American scene is the mistaken notion that engagement of the religious dimension somehow necessarily breaches the "separation of church and state."
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