Foreword -- Interrogating religion -- Religion trouble -- Seeing religion : six common clichs -- Gagging at the feast of two unexamined assumptions : religion, all good or all bad -- Politics using religion : anatomy of a clich -- The religion-is-no-good clich -- The second set of two clichs : religion is belief and belief in God -- Religion's private parts -- Powerless in paradise -- Two ways to eliminate religion -- Is religion our phlogiston? : an historical test case -- Talal Asad's religion trouble -- The trick of defining religion -- Owning religion -- How Durkheim took ownership of religion -- Religion and its despisers -- Interrogating power -- Confronting the paradox of power -- How power plays havoc with thinking about institutional violence -- Whom should we blame? : history on trial -- History's helper : we should also blameFoucault -- Problematizing power in South Africa -- Foucault versus Foucault -- Thinking about power as Auctoritas and hierarchy -- What more is to be done? : thinking about power as Auctoritas and social force -- Interrogating politics -- Where there is no politics : despotism and totalitarianism -- Autonomous politics -- Where our politics makes no sense -- Politics, the construct -- Two pernicious views of politics -- History lessons for Professor Morgenthau -- What constitutionalism owes the Council of Constance -- The emergence of the political from the religious -- Machiavelli and Luther : critical contributions to the autonomy of politics -- Foucault's fault II : everything is political -- The hidden fascism of thinking that everything is political -- Public and private : no absolute line of demarcation -- Resisting panopticon -- Afterword: The autonomy of politics and the nation-state -- Testing interrogations of religion, power, and politics : human bomber and the authority of sacrifice in the Middle East -- Is suicide bombing religious? -- Making too much of religion in suicide bombing : Islamofascism -- Dying to make too little of religion in suicide bombing : Robert A. Pape -- No religion in suicide bombing : Talal Asad -- How religion helps explain human bombing -- Human bombing is catastrophe, but also a triumph of secular immortality -- Human bombing = jihad + sacrifice -- Sacrifice or suicide? -- But do any Muslims really think human bombers are sacrifices? -- Sacrifice makes authority -- How and why sacrifice works : the authority of sacralization -- How and why sacrifice works : no free gifts