Democracy Archives | Contending Modernities

Protestant Germany after Nazism: Udi Greenberg Interviews Brandon Bloch

Brandon Bloch and Udi Greenberg
February 17, 2026

Postwar Protestant intellectuals spearheaded a complementary but distinct form of secularization: one in which the church did not retreat from politics but identified itself as the very source of secular democratic principles.

How Democratic is Dionysian Hierarchy?

Series: Symposium on Hope in a Secular Age

Eva Braunstein
February 4, 2026

If ecclesiastical or clerical hierarchy is modeled on that of the heavens, on what authority could an ordinary person dispute this power arrangement, modify it, or dissent from it?

Is Restorative Justice a Tradition? Reframing the Practices and Values of Restorative Justice

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion

Joshua S. Lupo
September 30, 2025September 30, 2025

Springs’s account of restorative justice might be strengthened by reframing it not only as a set of practices and a theory of justice but as a moral tradition.

The (National) Fantasies of Hope: Rethinking the 2024 Indian Elections

Rajbir Singh Judge and Hafsa Kanjwal
June 27, 2024June 27, 2024

The past and future of India always redeems the violent exclusions in the present.

Germany’s Split Identity: Liberal at Home, Reactionary on Palestine

Series: Symposium on The Moral Triangle

Amos Goldberg
February 9, 2022January 19, 2024

Personal and collective identities always hold tensions, ambivalences, paradoxes, and even contradictions. But when these become so extreme that the gaps cannot be negotiated, mitigated, bridged, or even discussed, they become a reason for deep (political) concern.

The IHRA’s Careless Conflations on Antisemitism (and A Few Alternatives)

Moshe Behar
March 25, 2021March 14, 2025

Branding as “antisemitic” criticism of Israeli actions pertaining to its occupation—on the ground that this applies a double standard—is Orwellian.

Who Are We the People? Unpopular Sovereignties in the United States and India

Series: India's Winter of Protest

Richard Amesbury
March 31, 2020May 4, 2020

Who are “we the people”? What makes this question puzzling is that it cannot, without circularity, be answered democratically, by appealing to the will of the people.

Modernity, Women, and War: Struggles for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East

Series: Decolonizing Narratives

Nisa Goksel
May 25, 2018October 4, 2018

While the discourse of spreading democracy to the Middle East goes hand in hand with “saving” women victims of Islamic fundamentalism, current wars create a destabilizing terrain for existing modern gender discourses.