Acknowledgements -- Politics and Religion: An Introduction (Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Šuber) -- PART A POLITICS AND RELIGION: CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES -- The Transformations of the Religious Dimension in the Constitution of Contemporary Modernities (Shmuel N. Eisenstadt) -- 'Axial' Breakthroughs and Semantic 'Relocations' in Ancient Egypt and Israel (Jan Assmann) -- Politics and Religion from an Anthropological Point of View: An Interview with Mary Douglas (Daniel Šuber and Marco Kaiser) -- Religion and Morality in Modern Europe Compared to the Religious Situation in the United States of America (Thomas Luckmann) -- Tales of Transcendence: Imagining the Sacred in Politics (Bernhard Giesen) -- PART B RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF MODERNITY -- Monotheism and Its Political Consequences (Jan Assmann) -- The Religious Origins of Modern Radical Movements (Shmuel N. Eisenstadt) -- Political Theology: Religion as Legitimizing Fiction in Antique and Early Modern Critique (Jan Assmann) -- PART C ASPECTS OF MODERN SECULARIZATION -- Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration: A Study on Secularization (Reinhart Koselleck) -- Secularization: German Catholicism on the Eve of Modernity (Rudolf Schlögl) -- Religion, Philosophy and Social Science: The Rise of Modern Social Science from the Point of View of Conceptual History (Daniel Šuber) -- Politics and Religion in European Nation-States: Institutional Varieties and Contemporary Transformations (Matthias Koenig) -- Index.