John Anderson

It is commonly assumed that the issue of religion declines in political significance as societies modernise. However, the upheaval associated with the shift from authoritarian to more open regimes can be accompanied by a revitalisation of religion. Individuals within these societies are struggling to find meaning in the seeming chaos of political change; religious elites are seeking to define their own role within the new order; and political elites are looking for new ways of ensuring legitimacy and building national unity. In this book John Anderson constructs a theoretical framework where he compares and contrasts the politics of religious liberty in two Southern European countries, two Central-Eastern European countries and the evolution of the former USSR, particularly Russia. Exploring these issues of religious 'recognition' and religious diversity, Anderson attempts to expose the wider problem of creating a democratic mentality in such transitional societies, through extensive original research and interviews.

This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades. It offers a historical overview of Christianity’s engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox ‘hesitation’ about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism. The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the ‘liberal-democracy paradox’. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths that proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political orders that are rooted in the idea of compromise, negotiation and bargaining. Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to students of politics, sociology and religion, and prove useful on a range of advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

What kind of collection could possibly find common ground among The Son of Kong , Platoon , and Pink Flamingos ? What kind of fevered minds could conceive of such a list? What are the unheard-of qualities that tie them all together? The answers: This book. The National Society of Film Critics. And the far-reaching enticements of the B movie itself. Once the B movie was the Hollywood stepchild, the underbelly of the double feature. Today it is a more inclusive category, embracing films that fall outside the mainstream by dint of their budgets, their visions, their grit, and occasionally- sometimes essentially- their lack of what the culture cops call"good taste.” The films in The B List are offbeat, unpredictable, and decidedly idiosyncratic. And that's why we love them.

The Lectures on Greek Philosophy of 1928 are among the earliest lectures we have of John Anderson's, delivered in the year following his arrival in Sydney in 1927. In these teachings he closely and critically followed John Burnet's classic work Early Greek Philosophy. Anderson's complete course covered the pre-Socratics extensively before progressing to the Socratic Dialogues and Aristotle. The study of Greek Philosophy for Anderson provided an important corrective to the attitudes and forms of inquiry dominating modern philosophy. The study of Greek philosophy was essential to Anderson because the Greeks 'are far clearer on many questions than modern philosophers...they avoid many modern errors, and especially... they are not, like the moderns, obsessed with "the problem of knowledge"... they do not set out to discover (that is to say, to know!) how, or how much, we can know, before they are prepared to know anything.' Modern philosophers need to return to 'the Greek consideration of things,' to finally abandon epistemology as 'an intrusion of mind into logic and of a false logic into psychology' and accept the direct common sense realism of the Greek philosophers.