This article analyzes the origins of the concept of symphonia, its historical development, and its utilization by the Russian Orthodox Church as a normative ideal for church-state relations. In various historical contexts, this concept has referred to different normative requirements; it relied on different paradigms in Byzantium and in medieval Russia and it acquired new meanings in Imperial Russia. The reinterpretations of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to legitimize its position in the political life of contemporary Russia take this concept far from its original meaning. Using methods from the history of concepts of, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, the author considers how the semantic transformations of symphonia in modern contexts by the Russian Orthodox Church lead to a hollowing of this concept. This conception is hardly reconcilable with the normative logic of the actual Russian political and legal systems.

Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution tells only part of the story about religious freedom in China. The Chinese constitution establishes five restrictions on the religious freedom described in Article 36. First, the Chinese Constitution establishes state atheism as an official ideology. All Chinese citizens, whether religious believers or not, are required to be educated in Marxist ideology and under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Second, religious freedom, along with other rights in the Chinese Constitution, are merely legal rights, rather than fundamental rights. The National People's Congress can therefore pass legislation limiting individuals’ religious freedom. Third, the Chinese Constitution enumerates basic obligations of citizens that limit religious freedom. Fourth, Article 36 protects only the inner freedom of religious belief, not freedom for religious practice. Finally, the second half of Article 36 places limitations on religious practices. Religious freedom in the Chinese Constitution is thus a highly limited freedom. To improve religious freedom protections in China it is necessary to amend the Constitution rather than simply promote full implementation in its current form.

This article presents and evaluates the legal thought of Muhammad ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (1910–1974) with a focus on his discourse on the objectives of Sharīʿa and the motives behind his reformulation of these objectives within the broader context of his political agenda. Al-Fāsī's concerns were not purely academic. As a political leader who struggled for the independence of his country and as a decision maker within the newly established Moroccan state, his theorization of Islamic law departed from traditional and modern efforts to negotiate the supposed status of Sharīʿa within the institutional structures of postcolonial Muslim states. The questions engaged in this article are to what extent did al-Fāsī's contribution to Maqāṣid go beyond its classical reformulations as represented by the Andalusian Māliki jurist Ibrāhīm Ibn Mūsā Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. AH 790/1388 CE) in his seminal work, Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿa, and whether al-Fāsī's work represents a turn in the field of Maqāṣid when compared with that of other modern Muslim jurists, among them Muhammad al-Ṭāhir Ibn ʿĀshūr (1886–1970). This article focuses on al-Fāsī's book on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa, Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa Makārimuhā, and its contribution to the ongoing efforts to accommodate Islamic law within the corpus of modern secular laws.

This article analyzes the relation between Confucianism and Chinese politics in the history, actuality, and future. The focus is on the special relationship between Confucianism and Chinese politics. First, the author provides a brief historical reflection on the relationship between Confucianism and Chinese traditional politics and develops three dimensions for such an interpretation. Second, the author explains the need for a Confucian renaissance in contemporary Chinese politics. The article then turns to the contemporary controversy about Confucianism and Chinese politics in mainland China. Jiang Qing's conception of Confucianism as state religion is then juxtaposed with Chen Ming's articulation of Confucianism as civil religion. In conclusion, the author argues that Confucianism should serve as an ethical resource for the state constitution, as well as a resource for social governance and cultivation.

In the history of the religion-state relationship in China, a model of subordination of religion to the state has been dominant for centuries. In recent years, some Chinese Protestant churches have advocated the model of separation of church and state. Through a historical and theological analysis, this study argues that in order to relieve the tensions between Chinese Protestantism and the contemporary Chinese government, a better conceptual alternative is to reconsider the issue in terms of autonomy rather than separation or subordination, and to argue for legally allowing the coexistence of both official and nonofficial churches and grant different degrees of autonomy to each.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, the role of religion in Africa was profoundly neglected. There were no university centers devoted to the study of religion in Africa; there was only a handful of scholars who focused primarily on religious studies and most of them were not historians; and there were relatively few serious empirical studies on Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religions. This paucity of rigorous research began to be remedied in the 1960s and by the last decade of the twentieth century, the body of literature on religion in Africa had expanded significantly. The burgeoning research and serious coverage of the role of religion in African societies has initially drawn great impetus from university centers located in the West and in various parts of Africa that were committed to demonstrating that Africa has a rich history even before European contact. Accordingly scholars associated with such university centers have since the 1960s acquired and systematically catalogued private religious manuscripts and written numerous pan-African, regional, national, and local studies on diverse topics including spirit mediumship, witchcraft, African systems of thought, African evangelists and catechists, Mahdism, Pentecostalism, slavery, conversion, African religious diasporas and their impact on host societies, and religion and politics. Although the three works under review here deal with the role of religion in an African context, they mainly contribute to addressing three major questions in the study of religion and politics: How do Islam and other religious orientations shape public support for democracy? What is the primary cause of conflict or religious violence? What strategies should be employed to resolve such conflicts and violence?