Miguel d'Escoto, the current president of the United Nations General Assembly, stole the torch from the world leaders attending the UN gathering in New York last week by single-handedly infusing a new and much-needed energy and importance into his role. It was a moment rarely seen before in the organization's history.

Reform of the UN, particularly in regards to empowering the General Assembly, may have stalled, but the real engine for such changes are bold, outspoken figures like d'Escoto, a former Sandanista-sympathetic priest. Such leaders can instill passion and enthusiasm in a UN bureaucracy at present run by veteran bureaucrat secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who after two years is finally beginning to shed his intolerable reticence and bring out the ire within him. In all, the UN has made a minor leap forward.

But, while the secretary general still remains on a steep learning curve, d'Escoto is riding high on a wave of popularity. He has boldly criticized the "shameful and deplorable" world conditions of today, attacked the failed "neo-liberal economic policies" and the Wall Street culture of "greed" and "selfishness" that has left "more than half the world's people" to "languish in hunger and destitution."

At a time of mounting global economic problems, when the US government is on the verge of rescuing Wall Street moguls at taxpayers' expense without slapping even one corporate CEO on the wrist, there is a large audience around the world for the powerful voice of d'Escoto. People want to hear his scathing assessment that the root cause of the current global crisis is the fact that "a small group of global corporations and financial institutions" control the world. D'Escoto wants to democratize the UN by restructuring the Security Council, and he aspires to see a real democratization of global capitalism.

Equally important, d'Escoto wants to pioneer a genuine spiritualization of the UN and, indeed, world politics. This is not so much because the priest in him dictates a perpetual evangelization, but because he is convinced that a cultural change, away from excessive materialism and insufficient spirituality, is a sine qua non for changing world politics in the direction of a more just and egalitarian system.

Indeed, this much was clear in d'Escoto's remarks at an interfaith gathering on the sideline of UN meetings where Iran's president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, was a keynote speaker.

Both men echoed each other in their respective monotheistic beliefs, the prioritization of justice and the need for solidarity with the destitute and the needy. Ahmadinejad professes his own version of Islamic liberation theology that resonates with d'Escoto's liberation theology. This parallel is stronger than in the past given Ahmadinejad's new accent on the compatibility of Islamic and Christian messianism and in light of his UN speech in which he predicted the rise of the Hidden Imam "accompanied by Jesus".

The narrowing of gaps between Shi'ite and Christian apocalypticism was in full display that night as the Iranian president and the president of the UN General Assembly spoke in unison regarding the need for spirit in the spiritless world. Although d'Escoto's discourse, however, seemed a full embrace of Marcuse's lament of the "one-dimensional man", that is, a critique of capitalism's reification of social relations that harkens back to the young Karl Marx.

Interestingly, the former leftist priest from Nicaragua and the former Basij (civilian militia) volunteer in the Iran-Iraq war seemed to share a great deal in their use of leftist-socialistic vocabulary. In fact, Ahmadinejad invoked the term "hegemony" a half dozen times in his speech before the General Assembly.

A Gramscian, anti-hegemonic bloc of Iran and Nicaragua, and other Latin and Central American states opposed to US domination, was thus put on plain display at an inter-religious forum that was supposed to promote the cause of dialogue across religious divides. Yet it was clearly a dual dialogue in which the anti-hegemonic subtext of Ahmadinejad and d'Escoto lurked behind their overtly religious pronunciations, although in contextualizing their thoughts it appears that Latin-left populism, also discernible in the behavior of Brazil's president, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, has left an indelible mark on the mindset of Iran's Shi'ite leadership.

Of course, this is not to overlook certain dissimilarities, as d'Escoto avoids a fundamentalist diagnosis of global problems as rooted in "forgetting God". Rather, he manifests a pluralistic approach that respects atheistic and agnostic groups and avoids labeling them, while simultaneously stating his own personal predilections and belief system rooted in Christianity.

Such spirited attempts to "bring faith" back on the world stage as an essential element of struggle for justice naturally have their own detractors. This is reflected in a new film, Religulous, by US comedian Bill Maher that mocks world religions basically as irrational and superstitious. Historically, however, hard times have as a rule represented a booming time for religion, as prayer and faith in God act as palliative remedies, prompting greater empathy for the poor and the hungry. This recalls Marx's wisdom that religion brings heart to a 'heartless world". The trick is, of course, how to tap into religion's positive avowal and solidaristic epistemology without at the same time embracing their not-so-enviable dark side that is associated with dogmatism and absolutism.

This is an open-ended question that, perhaps, can be tackled better via in-depth and on-going dialogue among religions. What die-hard secularists in the West, and other parts of the world, fail to understand is that "world-historical religions" are the byproducts of human civilizations that bring harmony as well as discord and division.

This dual role and impact of religion notwithstanding, there are obvious pros and cons to any new wave of "religionization" of world politics. Yet d'Escoto and other like-minded thinkers are on the right track when they place the emphasis on spirituality, and faith in god, as a wellspring of global solidarity. "I was influenced by my father and he instilled this way of thinking in me as a child," d'Escoto told his audience that night, reminding them that the young generation lacks this dimension and has been indoctrinated by an "I culture". The alternative "we culture" spearheaded by the UN, this is what the world desperately needs today, otherwise we are "lost in the mania of capitalist greed."

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his Wikipedia entry, click here.

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