Another good read on the need for Westerners to become more spiritually educated (especially Western politicians) is in this week’s Weekly Standard. John J. DiIulio Jr. writes
what I hereby baptize as spiritualpolitique is a soft-power perspective on politics that emphasizes religion’s domestic and international significance, accounts for religion’s present and potential power to shape politics within and among nations, and understands religion not as some abstract force measured by its resiliency vis-à-vis “modernity” and not by its supporting role in “civilizations” that cooperate or clash. Rather, a perspective steeped in spiritualpolitique requires attention to the particularities that render this or that actual religion as preached and practiced by present-day peoples so fascinating to ethnographers (who can spend lifetimes immersed in single sects) and so puzzling to most of the social scientists who seek, often in vain, to characterize and quantify religions, or to track religion-related social and political trends.
