To coincide with the launch of the new Critical Religion Association website, Dr Timothy Fitzgerald, Reader in Languages, Cultures and Religions at the University of Stirling, reflects on the broadening of Critical Religion's work and perspective. Critiquing the beliefs-systems of self-regulating markets is a key way of interrogating and re-understanding the discursive spaces marked out by the terms 'religion' and 'politics', he suggests. [Ekklesia is a partner of the CRA]

In this provocative reflection, Timothy Fitzgerald explains why he has become sceptical about the idea of a universal domain of politics, and what it means to claim that such a world exists. He begins to suggest that ‘the world of politics’ is as much a faith-imaginary as those beliefs typically attributed to ‘the world of religion’. Its questionable status is demonstrated by an ideological illusion that Fitzgerald looks at in his recent book, Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth (Continuum, 2011). To be continued.

In written documentation from colonial times many indigenous authors are not victims only, but innovative individuals, bringing together their own belief forms with Christian traditions and thus creating genres and contents of their own and for their own objectives, says Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar.

There have always been prophets of doom, says Dr Andrew Hass. History is punctuated by exclamatory voices crying, in one form or other, that catastrophe is imminent or the end is nigh. Sometimes they are seen as 'crying wolf'. In relation to the current global financial crisis, the issue of capitalism as religion, who and what we hope for, the ethical probings of counter-wisdom, and the insights of Walter Benjamin and others come together potently in their interrogation of who we are and where we are going.