Some people mistakenly believe Practical Ethics and the blog are solely about animals and the natural world. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are just as concerned with the questions that bedevil people, as we are in our relationship to the non-human world. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend and colleague who will be posting to the Practical Ethics Blog as an occasional contributor.

Andrew Davison is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College (New York, USA) and teaches during the summer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey). He is the author of Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey (Yale, 1998), The Philosophic Foundations of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, Islamism (with David Ingersoll and Richard Matthews, Prentice Hall 2000), the documentary “Leaps of Faith: Views of American Power, the Invasion of Iraq, and Citizenship in a Time of War” (with Benjamin Kalina, 2004), and Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey (with Taha Parla, Syracuse, 2004).

Andy is one of the foremost scholars on ‘theopolitics’ in the world today. Theopolitics, the intersection of religious and political ideologies, has been studied by the most important of social theorists — e.g. Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, RH Tawney, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Mulford Sibley, Charles Taylor, Elaine Pagels, Michel Foucault, Georg Gadamer. With this theoretical bent in mind, he is a leading interpreter of Turkey and the comparative lessons it has for religious-political tensions in contemporary societies. His work focuses on the ideas, lived norms and political-economic contexts that inform the normative politics and policies of culture-groups and nation-states. In this way, he speaks to the larger ethical dynamics that inform the work of everyday life. And of course, practical ethics!