A Statement of Purpose

Welcome to our new blog, A Return From Exile: A Forum on Religion & Politics. This project is a collaboration between myself, Erika Jahn (Harvard), and Matthew Salmon (University of Lethbridge), both students of religion with a keen interest in the fields of Political Science and International Relations. We have chosen to bring our mutual interests and our respective strengths together in order to provide a forum for the academic discussion of religion and politics at practical, theoretical, and methodological levels. We are using this blog to post book reviews, essays, and also commentary on current events as we see fit. We encourage anyone interested in collaborating with us to contact us directly.

As indicated by the title of the blog, I understand religion and the field of Religious Studies to have been exiled from the fields of IR and Political Science, as well as the Social Sciences more broadly. This I argue, and have argued before, has done a disservice to both fields. While this trend appears to be changing, there still exists a tension between the disciplines, (or I might argue more so on the side of Political Science), which is not only due to the modern love affair with secularism and the war against religion, but more possibly to do with fundamental theoretical and methodological differences.

We are facing a time when ‘secularism’ is no longer an infallible truth, when our beliefs regarding the decline of religion are proving to be false, when religion is playing an integral role in politics (despite our tendency to call it something else or outright ignore it), and perhaps more interestingly, the state system built on the premises of Westphalia and non-intervention are being directly challenged, making religion as a topic of international affairs that much more possible.

We look forward to learning from each other and also the opportunity of engaging others in this important discussion.

Kind Regards

Erika Jahn and Matthew Salmon

Posted in: Notes from the authors