both Jewish and Christian worldswere the originators of modernity.

He here
expands the argument, through a sweeping exploration of history, philosophy,
and literature: "The Marrano mind contributed to initiating the modern will:
the demand to reform the world, especially in matters of religious freedom, tol-
eration, free trade and the creation of a cosmopolitan-inspired model of life."
To reach this conclusion, Yovel must deal in a cavalier fashion with historical
evidence and supply a fictitious survey of the Inquisition and its methods, but
some readers will find that the end justifies the means, and any reader will be
entertained by his account.
Henry Kamen
Ulrich Beck, A God of One's Own (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 231 pp.;
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the
Roots of Modern Conflict. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 296 pp.
In an eye-opening essay titled "The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the Nation
State," Cavanaugh turns a well-known story on its head, arguing that the archi-
tects of the modern state, who forced the church out of the public sphere, invented
the internalized, localized, and limited notion of "religion" that we know today,
and then seized power. Rather than constructing the apparatus that would bring
peace to the world, as the liberal myth would have it, Cavanaugh insists that these
men invented the most destructive mechanism of war the world has ever known:
the secular nation state. Cavanaugh insists, further, that the "Wars of Religion"
were not the events that necessitated, the birth of the modern state; they were
themselves "the birth pangs of the State." His purpose in this text is "to focus on
the way revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the trans-
fer of ultimate loyalty to the modern State." If "the process of making States" was
indeed, as Cavanaugh claims, "inseparable from the pursuit of war by the power
elites of emergent States," then the challenge he takes on is how to bring religion
back and, by doing so, redeem the state from violence. His response to this ques-
tion is to imagine a brotberhood of Christian disciples who are dedicated to the
doctrines of peace and love that Christ taught and are ready to bring these into a
civil space that religion may occupy. This disappointingly impractical and unclear
conclusion to an essay that is otherwise razor sharp and pertinent may indicate
what we all must realizethat this is a question that will take many generations
(if not a God) to resolve. But the main point I would like to make, after this too-
lengthy preamble, is that Cavanaugh leaves us hard pressed to imagine how the
notion of a privatized, internalized "God of One's Own"pace Beckcould
ever be part of the solution to a problem that it is responsible for inventing in the
first place.
Alick Isaacs
DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1815962
s. Judith Butler, Jrgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West,
o The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. and intro.
Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen, afterword Craig Calhoun
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) , 137 pp.
This much we know: the separation of church and state never prevented religion
from entering, even permeating the public sphere. Now that we think of pure
secularism not only as a failure but as a fantasy, what is to be done? Four formi-
dable philosophers and their able hosts took on this vexing question one evening
several years ago in Lower Manhattan, and this volume is the record. Habermas
asserts once again (this time via a critique of Carl Schmitt's political theology)
that religion has a positive role to play in establishing the moral solidarity nec-
essary for the proper functioning of a rational state. Taylor demurs, suggesting
that the opposition of secular and religious does not adequately characterize a
public sphere in which many sources of (nonrational) moral commitment, both
religious and nonreligious, confront and interact with each other. Butler argues
(using Zionism as a test case) that religion must be reinvented to serve the needs
of political "cohabitation," albeit in terms that can be seen to be true to its tradi-
tion. And West enacts a blues-inflected prophesying meant to demonstrate that
religious passion is not the sole possession of fundamentalists and conservatives.
Discussions of such round out the volume, and the vexing question still nibbles
at the soul.
Michael P. Kramer
DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1815971
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