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More than anywhere else in political science and international studies, the students of European integration were, until recently, remarkably silent on the contemporary role of religion in EU politics. While it is true that until today, no monograph has been written specifically on the political relations between the EU and the Catholic Church, the situation has been changing: a quickly growing host of studies which analyses various links between the EU and religion or Christian churches has recently started to appear. This growing body of literature is comprised of a very diverse spectrum of perspectives ranging from legal studies and politico-philosophical essays about religion in the (European) public space to conceptual discussions of religious lobbying, the link between religion and European identity or Euroscepticism. Other studies cover the chronology of the dialogue between the EU and the churches, the relation of specific aspects of Catholic theology to the integration process and many other particular topics. Some authors innovatively explore the theological motivations of political actors or the theological justification of various political structures and institutions, sometimes directly pointing to the overlap between the sacred and secular orders a society upholds. Many other authors, however, stick to the older conceptual tools and focus on the religious agency in world politics, searching for religious actors who influence politics within particular states, who constitute independent quasi-states (the Holy See), or who act as non-state actors or even transnational institutions or networks. more...

In the conclusion of the classical tradition, the Scholastic philosopher Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) can be seen as a Peripatetic (he wrote the first commentary on Aristotle in Latin), and his writings are similarly infused with Neoplatonic influence, from sources such as the Theology of Aristotle. Grosseteste anticipated the Great Synthesis of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas by synthesizing the Aristotelian ideas with Catholic theology, producing a unique alternative way of conceiving unconscious thought. He contributed additional insights to the classical concepts of noetic thinking, imagination and perception: concepts that can be interpreted as entailing a form of unconscious thought, and which contribute to conceptions of unconscious thought in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis. more...

For the past twenty years, sociologists, New Left historians, post-structuralist theorists, and literary critics have argued the overwhelming importance of sexology and jurisprudence in constituting minority sexual subjectivities. Today a number of young scholars are making a different claim: namely, that Catholic theology, iconography, ritual, and devotion have provided a space in which late Victorian and early Modernist sexual dissidents could imagine themselves, so to speak, into existence.2 This religious discourse of sexual difference stands in complex, ambivalent, often resistant relationship to sexological discourse. Chronologically, it can precede, parallel, dialogue with, and contest the truths of emergent sexology. In the following essay, it will be seen in all these relations. more...

If the arguments that underpin the design of this volume have any merit, it follows that the best of the scholarship that has emerged in comparative political economy in the last three decades has been paradigmatically anchored — using the term ‘paradigm’ in the way that Thomas Kuhn did in his pathbreaking arguments on the history of scientific thought (Kuhn 1970). Chapter 1 used the image of a stage illuminated by spotlights to establish this notion of paradigms. It visualized them as great ice-cream cones of light shining down onto the stage of contemporary reality: bringing the light of understanding to the stage of social action in exactly the way that Thomas Kuhn argued that first Copernicus and Newton, and later Einstein, did to a stage of natural phenomena that had hitherto been understood in the west largely through the paradigm of Catholic theology and Aristotelian thought. As Thomas Kuhn taught us, a well-developed paradigm — in both the social and the natural sciences — is anchored in a distinctive ontology and epistemology. It rests on a clear view of the human condition and of the kinds of knowledge of that condition that are open to the humans participating within it. A well-developed paradigm builds onto that ontological base, sets of core categories for use in analysis. more...

The writings of Thomas Aquinas have a significance which goes far beyond the context in which they were written. A medieval theologian, Aquinas’s ideas remain central to the development of Catholic theology. Moreover, his Summa Theotogiae remains a classic text for the philosophical approach to theology. Aquinas was much influenced by Aristotelian categories of thought, and this is particularly evident when one considers his thinking on the nature and role of women. more...