the connections between anarchist politics and religion, Enrique Galván-Álvarez's chapter looks much further back, to Japan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a similar ambition. With the Buddhism of Shinran Shonin in mind, Galván-Álvarez looks to this tradition of Buddhist thought as especially relevant to contemporary anarchist practice. Through an analysis of Shinran's neglected writings, which offered a radical reading of the established sources of Buddhism, he sees Shinran offering a searching critique of political and religious hierarchies that has not only been neglected by historians, but retains its relevance nine centuries later as a fillip to those seeking to challenge hegemonic political forces.
Justin Meggitt's chapter interrogates the claim that 'Jesus was an anarchist' through a highly detailed exploration of both the history of anarchist thought, and a close reading of scriptural sources. Accepting the difficulties imposed by the heated debates concerning the very meaning of the label 'anarchist', and the issue of anachronism that might imperil efforts to associate Jesus with a political movement that emerged from social concerns and intellectual currents unleashed by industrial modernity, Meggitt nevertheless argues that there are good grounds for seeing Jesus through the lens of anarchism. Looking to Jesus' critique of existing power relations, and his quest for egalitarian and prefigurative forms of social life, Meggitt argues, echoing the reasoning of the anarchist Alexander Berkman, that Jesus was indeed an anarchist.
While Meggitt's contribution to this volume is notable for examining the perhaps unexpected connections between the historical Jesus and the anarchist tradition, Franziska Hoppen's chapter similarly sketches an original comparison in the work of two thinkers: Gustav Landauer and Eric Voegelin. Landauer's position in the anarchist canon is not in doubt, and his insightful and novel efforts to rethink the central claims of anarchist politics, while drawing on an idiosyncratic mysticism, are well established. Voegelin, however, a German academic with an interest in totalitarianism and political violence, is probably more unfamiliar to those inspecting the fault lines between anarchist theory and religious studies. This, Hoppen proposes, is a mistake, for considering
