August 3rd, 2016
posted by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
I would like to thank each of the contributors to this series for their generous engagement with my book, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. In this response I address a question that arose in several of the posts: what is the role of the scholar or expert in responding to what comes “after” or lies “beyond” religious freedom? In working on this project I have encountered considerable anxiety concerning what Jeremy Walton refers to as the threat of a “conceptual and political vacuum” arising in the wake of the argument of this book. I am interested in engaging with the concerns that motivate that anxiety. I also want to push back against the insistence that a strong prescriptive stance is required to do the work that I do. There are other paths forward and I’ll discuss a few of them here.
Read Religion and politics beyond religious freedom
July 22nd, 2016
posted by Ruth Marshall
July 20th, 2016
posted by J. Barton Scott
July 19th, 2016
posted by Benjamin Schonthal
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August 15th, 2016
posted by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
I was recently asked to speak about the current state of US religious freedom law. I guess it somehow seemed appropriate to do that in Indiana—at ground zero in the culture wars, where religious freedom seems to have gone to die. I used the occasion to address the peculiar relationship that religious studies as a field seems to have with the Supreme Court and its decisions—indeed, with religious freedom, American style.
It is surprisingly common for religious studies scholars, particularly, but not exclusively, those teaching at US public universities, to define their work with reference to the jurisprudence of the First Amendment. Not infrequently, they point very specifically to the Court’s 1963 decision in Abington School District v. Schempp as the authorizing text for religious studies as a field. (See, among many recent examples, Jonathan Sheehan on “Why We Should Teach Theology in the Public University” and Ivan Strenski’s review of the Norton Anthology of World Religions in History of Religions.) As my colleague, American religious historian Sarah Imhoff, tells it in her recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion piece about the Schempp decision, many religious studies scholars seem to believe that “The Supreme Court, like the God of Genesis, came down and created by separation. Earth from sky, land from water; the teaching of religion from teaching about religion.” In other words, we seem to believe that it is law—or maybe, very specifically, the Court—that properly defines our job.
Read Teaching religion
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August 10th, 2016
posted by Daniel Philpott
The
United States is unique among nations in claiming a heritage of religious freedom and a mission to spread it overseas. This is difficult to dispute. What has become hotly disputed is how this is to be regarded.
An “orthodox” view holds that the United States has played a special role—a providential part, as some would have it—in carrying a universal message of religious freedom to the world. First, American colonies were havens for religious refugees; then the American founding was a milestone for constitutional norms of religious freedom; then, over the subsequent two centuries, the United States became a haven for religious people unwelcome elsewhere: Baptists, Mormons, Mennonites, Muslims, Amish, Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others.
Read Exporting Freedom
Religion and digital culture
Sociologist Jana Glaese asks what conversions in Germany and the United States can tell us about the entanglements of race and religion?
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