ABSTRACT
Secularist thinkers continue to pursue the Enlightenment project of eliminating religion from public discourse. To some, religion is a contributing factor to many of today’s societal problems. An example is Mark Juergensmeyer’s (2000) book Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Others, such as Anthony J. Lisska (1996), seek to establish a natural law theory devoid of religious content based on the assumption that Enlightenment philosophy alone is the fundamental theory on which human rights are based. However, at the same time it appears that religion is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Works such as Johnston et al. (1994), Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, have become mandatory reading in many diplomatic and political circles. While secularizing modernity believes it has made “progress” since the Enlightenment, it is surprising to many that religion is still a factor and increasingly so in many areas of thought.
