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Religion plays a central role in nearly every aspect in people's life of most pre-modern cultures. Especially the interconnection between religion and politics is a common fact but the details of this relation and interacting processes behind this are not substantially studied. Therefore, this volume does not aim to confirm the linkage of religion and politics in general but to investigate its functionalities in political processes. A focus is placed on the political role of religious personnel beyond their religious and cultic tasks and their influence in pre-modern societies from a cross-cultural perspective. Specialists from various disciplines present their research based on case studies. Thereby this interdisciplinary volume covers a wide geographical and chronological range from ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age until medieval England. These papers are organised according to core functions questioning the instrumentalisation of religious personnel. ; Religion plays a central role in nearly every aspect in people's life of most pre-modern cultures. Especially the interconnection between religion and politics is a common fact but the details of this relation and interacting processes behind this are not substantially studied. Therefore, this volume does not aim to confirm the linkage of religion and politics in general but to investigate its functionalities in political processes. A focus is placed on the political role of religious personnel beyond their religious and cultic tasks and their influence in pre-modern societies from a cross-cultural perspective. Specialists from various disciplines present their research based on case studies. Thereby this interdisciplinary volume covers a wide geographical and chronological range from ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age until medieval England. These papers are organised according to core functions questioning the instrumentalisation of religious personnel.

The Church in Chile, in its efforts to reach and evangelize the poor, crippled by a gradually diminishing clergy, has over more than a decade come to place extraordinary emphasis on the presence of religious personnel in marginal urban and rural areas. This pastoral priority has induced considerable numbers of religious women to leave their original works (especially education) to take part in the direct apostolate in marginal areas, while the majority of foreign religious women who have recently arrived have opted to follow their example.

One key issue which has surrounded the payment of unemployment compensation benefits has been whether states could deny payment of such benefits to individuals who were out of Work for religious reasons. This presented a classic clash between state denial and First Amendment religious protections. In all such confrontations from 1963 until 1990 the Supreme Court sided with the claimant, but reversed itself in that year in Oregon v. Smith. This reversal triggered off the introduction of two House Bills calling for concepts to be enacted into general law which would be congruent with the earlier Supreme Court compensation decisions.

This article re-conceptualizes the secular-religious relationship by examining the 'secularized' sacred sites (temples) and the 'sanctified' secular places (religious-themed scenic areas built upon the temples). This article begins with acknowledging the dialectical secular-religious relationship and pushes this line of theorization further from a socio-spatial perspective. By using the 'trialectics of spatiality' analytical framework, this article examines the production/reproduction of both the secular and the religious spaces that determined and were simultaneously determined by the diversified religion-state relations. Contextualized in the 2000s when the Chinese state held ambivalence towards religions, this article presents a comparative study of the spatial interaction between the local state and the religious personnel respectively around the planning of three state-sponsored religious cultural scenic areas. By delving into the territorial strategy of simulation, this article demonstrates how and why Chinese secular and religious agents deliberately crossed over the socially constructed boundaries between the normatively defined secular and religious domain.