The rhetoric of the bishops’ statement is familiar to anyone who has followed conservative Christian activism around the cause of religious freedom in the United States over the last two decades or so, though the recourse of Catholic officials to such language is a relatively recent innovation. Meanwhile, their definition of “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” remains both opaque and expansive—again, in imitation of conservative Christian activism tout court. The bishops note the priority of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the priority of (“our first…liberty”) religious freedom among the freedoms guaranteed by that amendment. Acknowledging that Americans are not alone in their claims concerning freedom (“freedom is not only for Americans”), they nevertheless see the United States as exceptional in its relationship to it (“we think of it as something of our special inheritance”), seeing Americans as the particular guardians of freedom (“we are stewards of this gift, not only for ourselves but for all nations and peoples who yearn to be free”).

The bishops go on to enumerate specific examples of “religious liberty under attack.” By the logic of priority, the mandate issued earlier in the year by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring health insurance coverage for contraception (which the document calls “HHS mandate for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs”), part of the administration’s efforts to assure compliance with the ACA (aka health care reform), holds pride of place in the list of instances of religious freedom under siege. But the bishops cite a number of other domains of constraint: the refusal by state and local authorities to use the foster care or adoption placement services of Catholic Charities because of the organization’s unwillingness to place children with cohabiting or same-sex couples; the state of Alabama’s punitive anti-immigrant legislation; the denial of official recognition of a Christian student group at the University of California Hastings College of Law (because of the group’s requirement that its leaders be Christian and abstain from extra-marital sexual activity); New York City’s discontinuation of the practice of renting public school buildings in New York City to churches for weekend services. Religion (a category represented in the statement exclusively by Christian examples) is under siege, the argument runs, on the federal, state, and local levels, and on many different fronts.

But if the document seeks to catalog the wide range of threats to religious liberty, it is nevertheless primarily concerned with undergirding the bishops’ campaign against the inclusion of contraceptive coverage under the ACA. The document sets the terms of the debate agonistically and dramatically. Although the ACA (along with subsequent regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services in the spring of 2012 to assure compliance with the law) is nowhere named explicitly, it certainly resides behind the characterization of “an unjust law [that] cannot be obeyed,” a law that imposes the will of the state upon religious institutions and individuals. Arguing by analogy, the bishops juxtapose the need to disobey such an unjust law—a duty Catholics “must discharge…as a duty of citizenship and an obligation of faith”—to the religiously inflected arguments and actions of the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as their prooftext. Strikingly, the bishops also take care to distinguish between “conscientious objection” to a societal requirement (unspecified, but one might think of conscientious objection to military service) from the requirement to resist an unjust law. One can imagine that the bishops are seeking to sidestep the question of all of the other ways in which tax dollars, for example, are used to support militarism, capital punishment, or other forms of state-sponsored violence to which religious individuals or institutions might object. Opposition to these kinds of institutionalized forms of state violence does not apparently rise to the status of opposition to “unjust law,” which “cannot be obeyed.”

Framing their opposition to the health care mandate in terms of religious freedom, it needs to be emphasized, is a strategic move that narrows the terrain significantly: to oppose the bishops’ opposition to the health care mandate requires one to take a position against religious freedom. Well played, bishops.

The problem, of course, is that while the bishops speak of religious freedom and seek to portray a consensus that aligns themselves with evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews, they conveniently exclude from the conversation other co-religionists who do not share their ethical assessments of the particular issues under debate (e.g., access to medical services, reproductive freedom, etc.) nor their political agenda. (Consider, as just one example, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which includes the Episcopal Church, most of the mainline Protestant denominations, the Unitarian Universalist church, virtually all of the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jewish governing bodies, and numerous Christian and Jewish national organizations.) Moreover, while advocating for a public square in which religious arguments and actors move freely, the bishops disingenuously frame the issue as one that sets in opposition a “naked public square” (“stripped of religious arguments and religious believers”) against a “civil public square” (“where all citizens can make their contribution to the common good”), carefully disavowing any claim that they desire a “sacred public square” (“which gives special privileges and benefits to religious citizens”). “At our best,” they write, “we might call this an American public square.” Framed in this way, the very presence of religious arguments and believers is precisely what makes the public square “American.” Their absence is, on its face, un-American. And yet, if the public square is a space of deliberation and debate, a space where arguments are evaluated and contested, it seems as though “religion” itself remains somehow immune to contestation and critique—in the public square, but not of it.

One could engage in an extended exploration of the way in which the bishops’ framing of these issues, clearly beholden to nearly two decades of evangelical Protestant activism around religious freedom, depend upon a theoretical incoherency (whereby institutions protecting religious freedom must inevitably define and thereby delimit what counts as “religion”) and revisit debates over the uneasy truce between religion and politics, church and state, that has been forged by recourse to the Protestant secular. But what I prefer to do here is to engage in an imaginative exercise: What would it mean for the bishops to put their money where their mouths are and to defend religious freedom in their own polity—that is, within the Catholic church itself?

Because, on another Catholic horizon, the Vatican has decided that the exercise of what one might well call religious freedom on the part of American women religious—the exercise of conscience—is a problem requiring episcopal oversight. In other words, the sisters are in need of some church-sponsored discipline and a reining-in of their faithful enactment of their own conscience. This action has been undertaken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Congregatio pro doctrina fidei), the modern incarnation of the Inquisition, which has issued a “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,” the culmination of a process of critical investigation initiated by the Vatican beginning in early 2009, focused on the LCRW, an organization that represents 80% of Catholic nuns in the United States. Accused of “a rejection of faith [that] is also a serious source of scandal and … incompatible with religious life,” objectionable “policies of corporate dissent” (on issues of women’s ordination and homosexuality), and “radical feminist themes,” the LCRW has become the target of disciplinary action.

This is not the place to parse all of the details of the Doctrinal Assessment, which seeks “to implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church, the Holy See, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” But in the context of the US bishops’ expression of a deep commitment to the notion of religious freedom, it might be a worthwhile imaginative exercise to ponder the following question: What would a defense of religious freedom look like, if the LCWR were considered “religion” in this case and the Vatican were considered “the state”?

Of course, the authors of the Doctrinal Assessment—all American cardinals, I have been told—would reject the question as I have framed it since they insist that faithful religious life can only be lived in “allegiance of mind and heart to the Magisterium of the Bishops,” as they put it in the opening paragraph of the Assessment, where they quote from John Paul II’s 1996 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita consecrata. In doing so, however, they rather show their hand. Religious freedom emerges as nothing more than a mode of shoring up the authority of the Magisterium of the Bishops, not a set of values that shelters and protects the acts of conscience undertaken by Catholic women religious in the United States. Yet ironically, recourse to a robust notion of personal conscience is an unambiguously orthodox position in Catholic theology and a fully justifiable exercise of religious freedom on the part of the nuns.

The widespread outrage among Catholics in the U.S. in response to the Doctrinal Assessment’s attack on the LCWR—outrage that has produced numerous thoughtful essays about the profound value and integrity of the actual work of Catholic nuns, vigils of support in cities across the country, and even the satirical Twitter hashtag #radicalfeministthemes—has made it clear that the actions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not pass a simple smell test.

In their statement on religious liberty, the Conference of Bishops writes, “The Christian church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens.” To which the supporters of the Catholic sisters in the US might simply respond, “The Catholic women religious and their allies in the church do not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all members of the church.”

The Economist

It seemed historic. Muslim scholars, 170 in number and representing nine schools of legal thought (including four main Sunni ones and two Shia), gathered in Amman and declared that, whatever their differences, they accepted the others’ authority over their respective flocks. Implicitly, at least, they were renouncing the idea that their counterparts were heretics. Some called that meeting in Jordan in 2005 the biggest convergence since 969, when a Shia dynasty took over Egypt.

In spite of continued efforts by those religious leaders that gathered in 2005, the magazine relays that “seen from the outside, feuds between Sunnis, who make up roughly 80% of the world’s Muslims, and the Shia minority (most of the rest), remain savage and are, in some ways, worsening.” Among the reasons cited for this deterioration are a decreased Western presence in Iraq and the ongoing transformations of the Arab Spring:

Paradoxically enough, one reason for the worsening in intra-Muslim relations is the declining role of the West. At the time of the Amman gathering in 2005, Iraq was in the grip both of horrific Sunni-Shia violence and of American occupation. It was possible to convince ordinary Muslims (however unfairly) that America was to blame for stoking this tension; and that, for dignity’s sake, followers of Islam should stand together against the outsiders’ game of divide-and-rule. Now the American occupation of Iraq is over, and hatred between Sunnis and Shias there has a ghastly momentum of its own: the Shia prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has accused a Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, of complicity in terrorism and forced him to flee. On April 30th he was charged with multiple murders.

But perhaps the biggest change is that Sunnis think they are now winning the global contest. Seven years ago it seemed that Shia Islam, whether in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, was on the march. Hot-headed Sunnis who yearned to see a government or movement that would confront Israel in the name of Islam had to find role-models across the sectarian divide, in Iran, or in the mullahs’ Lebanese protégés in Hizbullah.

These days zealous Sunnis need no longer look to swashbuckling Shias for inspiration. The real action is unfolding in their own homelands, at least in north Africa or the Levant. Nor need they look abroad for political ideology: the Arab spring has established the Sunni sort of political Islam as a powerful, domestically based force that has emerged from the underground or from exile. Rachid Ghannouchi, for example, Tunisia’s best-known Islamist, has returned from London to become probably the most powerful figure in the land. Vali Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Tufts University in America and a former adviser to the Obama administration, says that—rightly or wrongly—Sunnis believe that Western sanctions are weakening Iran, and that the combined efforts of Sunnis and the West will also topple Iran’s only Arab ally, Syria. From a Sunni perspective, these impending victories outweigh the travails of their co-religionists in majority-Shia Iraq.

Read more here.

Sitting in his jewelry shop in Djerba’s covered souk, David Bitan said life for Tunisia’s Jews was changing, much as it has for all Tunisians since the revolt. Business had yet to recover and the instability that dogs Tunisia affected them too.

“We are not afraid of Salafis who talk too much. We’re afraid of those who say nothing, then do something,” said Bitan.

“Things have changed since the revolution. Before, people were afraid of the police. Now, we are under pressure. The police is weak, so racism is increasing. People are not afraid.”

The pilgrimage to Djerba, which attracted a peak number of 10,000 pilgrims in 2000, was cancelled last year because visitors were reluctant to wade into the charged political environment of the Arab Spring. Less than 100 made the journey.

Ahead of this year’s event around May 9 – the anniversary of the death of a second century Jewish scholar – Tunisia’s new Islamist-led government has been at pains to assure Jews that they are welcome.

But news of occasional unrest, such as a day of clashes between police and protesters on April 9, still spooks visitors thinking of making the pilgrimage, mainly from Germany and France.

Tunisia’s Jewish community once numbered 100,000 people. But fear, poverty and discrimination prompted several waves of emigration after the creation of Israel in 1948. Many left after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Most went to France or Israel.

Read the full article here.

The graduation wars have begun. As thousands of students at Catholic colleges and universities prepare to celebrate their graduation and take their degrees, their campuses are embroiled in controversy over who should and should not be permitted to speak at graduation and, in some cases, receive an honorary degree.

I am of two minds about these wars. On the one hand, as I suggested last week, Catholic institutions of higher learning must not be pushed into a kind of intellectual ghetto by the Torquemada-like fanatics at the inaptly named Cardinal Newman Society. Catholic colleges and universities should not be afraid to engage the culture and listen to anyone who has something to say on their campus. What are we afraid of? That a single appearance by an errant Catholic or a controversial non-Catholic will rob our students of their commitment to the faith? If so, we are not doing a very good job of inculcating that faith in the first place. More importantly, whenever the Church has built a wall around its institutions to keep the forces of the ambient culture out, the procedure has failed. The CNS folk can build walls as high as they like and still at the end of a graduation ceremony, and indeed at the end of every Mass, we are sent out into that world beyond. The urge to censor begins in a humane instinct, the desire to protect those we love from influences that might harm them, but it cannot always and everywhere trump another humane instinct, the desire to explore and engage, least of all at a college campus. A ghettoized university is no university at all.

On the other hand, I rather like the fact that we have these debates about the Catholic identity of our colleges and universities (and hospitals and social service providers). Harvard’s motto was once “Pro Christo et Ecclesiae” – for Christ and His Church – but having become a hotbed of Unitarianism and than rationalism, the motto was switched to the more anodyne “Veritas” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Other great colleges and universities in America find, in the center of their campuses, over-large and under-used chapels – think Princeton, Yale, Wake Forest, Wesleyan – as a testimony to their former religious sensibilities and current lack of such sensibilities. James Tunstead Butchaell’s magisterial (in both senses) book The Dying of the Light catalogues how religious universities lost their religious identity over time and it makes for some grim reading. It is important, even vital, that we Catholics not let that happen to our institutions and so the debate about Catholic identity is a welcome one: we heard last Sunday about the need to prune in order to grow. Between the coarse censoriousness of CNS and the blithe indifferentism of the Ivys, we must find our way forward.

Read the full essay here.

Whatever name we assign to the events in the Arab world, we end up trapping ourselves in one limiting or problematic framework or another. The concept of seasons is embedded in a long history of Orientalizing the region, as if what happened in the history of Arab people before 2011 did not qualify for an acknowledgment of the energies, struggles, and fighting for a better life they have been waging against western colonialism, intrusions, and unjust local governments for over 100 years. From Algeria, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq to Palestine, Arab people have been putting up a hard fight for over a century against a western, colonial and neo-colonial, capitalist and racist modernity. But this hardly registers in a western-centric mindset and discourse, nor among many in the Arab world.

Despite the obsession of the West with the Arab world, and despite its claims of superior knowledge, Arab people continue to be “misunderstood,” and/or maligned, and established academic theories continue to fail to explain and/or predict developments in the region. With every failure, a more arrogant wave of theories are generated by the same failing western-centric expertise, replacing or continuing the old paradigms of “knowledge” as if nothing had happened. Failures are evaded, and expertise, analyses, and prescriptions are repeated with the same arrogance.

This pattern is due to at least three interrelated issues: modernity, Orientalism, and Eurocentrism, which have been at work in combination since the ascendance of western modernity to global hegemony, with its assumption that humans are rational and thus can achieve accurate knowledge and be accurately studied.

In addition to interviews, “action notes,” and a reflection by Samir Amin, the issue contains a number of peer-reviewed articles, which are all available to read under the journal’s open-access policy:

• Dream history of the global South by Vijay Prashad (PDF)
• Containing the “Arab Spring” by Jeremy Salt (PDF)
• The legacy of US intervention and the Tunisian revolution: promises and challenges one year on by Azadeh Shahshahani and Corinna Mullin (PDF)
• Syria, the Arab uprisings, and the political economy of authoritarian resilience by Bassam Haddad (PDF)
• Corporate American media coverage of Arab revolutions: the contradictory messages of modernity by Steven Salaita (PDF)
• A politics of non-recognition? Biopolitics of Arab Gulf worker protests in the year of uprisings by Ahmed Kanna (PDF)
• The Arab upsurge and the “viral” revolutions of our time by Aditya Nigam (PDF)

Explore the full issue here.

Indeed, the violence of Saturday — coming on the heels of a similar confrontation between Salafists and Pro-NRW last week — would seem exactly what Pro-NRW had been hoping for. The stridently anti-Muslim party has spent years struggling, and failing, to attract the kind of attention comparable right-wing populist parties have achieved in virtually all of Germany’s neighboring countries. Sunday parliamentary elections in the group’s home state have spurned them to once again try to attract votes.

Read the full story at Spiegel Online.

Everson v. Board of Education

As Terry Eastland notes in his commentary on these two cases, “most of the religion-clause cases decided by the Supreme Court” in the wake of Cantwell have involved “federal litigation over religion-clause claims against states.” This is in contrast, he observes, to the first 150 years of Supreme Court religion-clause jurisprudence when all of the very few cases heard by the Court “involved claims against the federal government.”

On the one hand, this geographic shift has meant that formalized practices of religious establishment in individual states are henceforth subject to scrutiny and challenge. On the other, the application of the disestablishment principle to the states has also contributed, I’d argue, to the plaints of many Christians that a monolithically secular state is driving religion from public life. What we have is a regionalization of public conflicts over the place of religion and religious people in public life and in the state. This “and” is necessary, for the public is not the state—a confusion that regularly trips up public debates about the meaning and practice of religious freedom in the United States.

Christian dominance in American public life—while a truism—is itself not monolithic in practice. Instead, we might better speak of religious cultures, plural, and of secular negotiations. Particular Christianities are dominant in some states and regions in the U.S. in ways that strain against a larger overlay of mainline Protestantism as the baseline for what both national religious culture and national secular identity have meant historically. I’ll come back to this point.

Although he may seem like too easy of a target, former Senator and, now, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s conflation of the state and the public square is illuminating precisely because it is not exceptional. In a notorious February 2012 appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” Santorum proclaimed his expansive vision of First Amendment free exercise: “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country. This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion.” Santorum went on to express his visceral disgust at those who would bar religious people from the public square, seamlessly shifting his focus from the state to the public square. Making then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association stand in as the ur-moment of this enforced bracketing of religion from all of public life, Santorum glossed Kennedy’s speech: “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?”

This is, pardon the pun, a rather gross misreading of what Kennedy actually said. But, what interests me here are the following: (1) the way Santorum effortlessly elides the public square with the state and (2) Santorum’s elevation of free exercise over disestablishment as the living pulse of religious freedom. Minimizing—if not outright denying—disestablishment licenses the hyperbole of Santorum’s claim that the state can set no limits on the reach of “the church” into its operations. To be sure, Santorum’s language was very colorful, but his analysis and the ressentiment it bespeaks are broadly shared among evangelical Christians and a growing number of conservative Catholics.

As Janet R. Jakobsen and I stress in our book Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, it matters a great deal to possibilities for agonistic democracy and meaningful religious freedom whether one sees the two components of First Amendment religious freedom—disestablishment and free exercise—as separable or interstructuring. In our view, and we are hardly legal outliers on this question, disestablishment is the structuring condition for free exercise. Otherwise, those who are religiously different or not religious at all may well find their lives not simply less admired and valued than those who belong to the dominant religion; they may find they have diminished legal status.

And yet, in public political debates over the meaning of religious freedom, too often we see the very balkanization replayed by Santorum: proponents of more religion in U.S. public life and in government (and let’s be clear, not just any religion, but of particular Christianities) lean heavily on the free exercise component and underplay disestablishment. Conversely, many secularists—not all secularists, to be sure, but many—stress the absolute separation of Church and State and minimize free exercise.

At least in principle, the appearance of religion in public spaces or the use of religious language and arguments in public debates need not equate to the state’s endorsement of any religion at all nor need it lead to religious dominance. To quote one of my favorite lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited; or, the Flowers of Progress: “That’s the theory but in practice, how does it act?” Not so well, as it happens. This is because U.S. public life operates under conditions of Christian dominance. Particular Christian practices and claims can “float,” sometimes being overtly marked as religious, at other times passing as secular, resulting in a situation Jakobsen and I have elsewhere termed “Christian secularism.”

The public itself (as an ideal) and public spaces (in their messy practices) are prepared in advance to credit Christian assumptions and value claims as integral to public life and national character. In such a context, it can be hard for those who are religiously different and those who are not religious at all to get a word in edgewise. In addition, these same Christian assumptions can pass into the state as the secular logic of universal morality and civic order, as we have seen in numerous state laws and referenda about same-sex marriage. I am writing these words a day after North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment One, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Although many liberal and progressive secularists had hoped, even expected, that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 heralded the end of religion’s role in public debates and policy decisions, this hope has not been realized. And that’s an understatement, as any quick perusal of the roiling election-year debates over abortion and same-sex marriage show. Again, witness North Carolina. Or the debates over the provisions for contraception coverage in the Affordable Healthcare Act.

On one level, the hope was for an end to the influence of conservative religion—really, conservative Christianities—on policy-making, particularly in issues concerning sexual life. But, it was also, for many secularists, a desire for the elimination of any trace of religion in the U.S. public sphere, as if religion were a toxin from which they needed or even had a fundamental right to be protected. This too shows too measly an understanding of the scope of religious freedom and the parameters of agonistic democratic engagement. Democracy does not always feel good. In everyday life, we bump up against each other and may well be discomforted by differences we cannot assimilate or will not understand. And this is among the reasons we need courts to protect the rights and freedoms of unpopular minorities: so that bumps will not turn into overt violence or formalized exclusions. Encounters with difference, including with moral difference, are not a hostile take-over nor take-away, nor an instance of “indoctrination”—whether of religious values or secular. (Given the entwinement of Christian values with the values of the secular in the United States, the “or” in that previous sentence needs critical pressure as well.)

In using the loaded word “indoctrination,” I am invoking numerous heated debates about higher education and, in particular, the claim that universities are dominated by liberals and indoctrinate their students into secular values—thereby, severing them from their families of origins. Indeed, just such a claim was made by Rick Santorum in the very same interview in which he declared his nauseated response to Church-State separation.

The word “indoctrination” also makes a curious appearance in Everson. At issue in that case were reimbursements approved by the township of Ewing, NJ, and paid out to parents for money they spent busing their children to schools, whether public or Catholic. A local tax-payer challenged the payments to the parents of parochial school students as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. A split court (5-4) held that the use of such public monies did not unconstitutionally establish religion in the state. Fascinatingly, even the four dissenters agreed with the logic of the decision—namely, for a wall of separation between Church and State. The expansive terms of Justice Hugo Black’s conception of disestablishment could easily have been penned by any one of the four dissenters. Here’s Justice Black, writing for the 5-member majority:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever from they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State.” Reynolds v. United States, supra, 98 U.S. at page 164.

I always discuss the Everson case in my undergraduate class on “Religion, Sexuality, and American Public Life.” I sketch the basic issues in dispute for this case, tell them it was a split decision, and then show them the above passage from the majority decision. In light of this purple passage, I ask them what they think the holding was. Inevitably, they think the Court ruled against public funding for buses to Catholic schools.

Like my students, I share the dissenting justices’ puzzlement that the majority could have put a bus-sized hole in the fabled “wall of separation.” But the larger lesson here, beyond providing my students a quick First Amendment jurisprudence 101, is that the sharing of general principles (here, the “wall of separation”) does not yet tell us anything about how they will be set down in practice. Moreover, the wall described in Justice Robert H. Jackson’s dissent seems to call for refortifying dominant Protestant notions of what secularism should look and feel like in practice. He does so via a stunning comparison-contrast between a Catholic emphasis on education as indoctrination into faith and a—well, what exactly?—Protestant/secular/Protestant-secular emphasis on neutrality and the value of mature adult “choice.” Justice Jackson writes:

It is no exaggeration to say that the whole historic conflict in temporal policy between the Catholic Church and non-Catholics comes to a focus in their respective school policies. The Roman Catholic Church…does not leave the individual to pick up religion by chance. It relies on early and indelible indoctrination in the faith and order of the Church by the word and example of persons consecrated to the task.

Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it than with the Catholic culture and scheme of values. It is a relatively recent development…organized on…the premise that secular education can be isolated from all religious teaching so that the school can inculcate all needed temporal knowledge and also maintain a strict and lofty neutrality as to religion. The assumption is that after the individual has been instructed in worldly wisdom he will be better fitted to choose his religion. Whether such a disjunction is possible, and if possible whether it is wise, are questions I need not try to answer.

The spirit of education conjured in this passage may well reveal its own “romantic yearnings”—to draw on the language of Winnifred Sullivan’s contribution to this forum—for a unified secular culture. However, as the Justice’s toggle between not quite Protestant, but not not-Protestant either suggests (“Our public school, if not a product of Protestantism, at least is more consistent with it…”), this unified secular culture—the fantasy of it, at least—is linked historically and imaginatively to what Robert Orsi has termed a “domesticated Protestantism tolerable within [the secular learning cultures of] the academy” that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

If this domesticated Protestantism did not need to plead its case in the classroom, this is because its style of personhood and structures of feeling were the very building blocks of secular public education—Protestant building blocks mistaken for walls of separation. Increasing religious diversity in the United States, including diversity among Protestants, has called many of Justice Jackson’s operative assumptions into question. I suspect that the justices in the majority in Everson did not quite anticipate the wild contemporary landscape of American religious pluralism either.

But there are also important connections to Sullivan’s discussion of “The world Smith made.” If religious authorities now find themselves in the ironic position of appealing to the secular state to enforce sectarian orthodoxies, one of the ongoing and crucial laboratories for this contest between discipline and dissensus will be public school classrooms. The mission—a term I choose with great deliberation—Justice Jackson attributed to the secular public classroom is not and never was innocent of religious domination. Those of us concerned about attacks on public education—from budget cuts to the right wing’s politicization of curriculum—would do well to remember and mark the specific histories of domination on which we stand our ground in the name of First Amendment freedoms of religion and of speech.

I don’t think Muslim Americans should be cowering in their homes or unduly      paranoid. There is, however, more specific evidence that Muslim Americans have faced an observable backlash and discrimination since 9/11.

As noted, law enforcement agencies target Muslims for special surveillance.

In communities including Staten Island; Brooklyn; Temecula, Calif.; Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Lower Manhattan, there have been street protests organized in opposition to permitting Muslims to build mosques. And multiple Republican presidential candidates spoke out against the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Here is a map the ACLU has put together of anti-mosque incidents.

In hate crimes based on religion, Muslims are the second most-victimized group, and every year since 9/11 they’ve been victimized at rates higher than before the attacks. Is that a coincidence?

President Obama is accused by some of his political enemies of being “a secret Muslim,” as if Islamic faith itself is a slur.

Said Gallup in 2010, “More than 4 in 10 Americans (43%) admit to feeling at least ‘a little’ prejudice toward Muslims — more than twice the number who say the same about Christians (18%), Jews (15%) and Buddhists (14%).”

“A decade after Sept. 11, 2001, the survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, shows that a majority of Muslims say the terrorist attacks made it more difficult to be a Muslim in the United States. Many said that they had been singled out by airport security officers and that people had acted suspicious of them or called them offensive names. But half also said Americans had been friendly toward them, and three-quarters expressed faith that with hard work, they could get ahead.” There is bad news and good news in those numbers. I am not sure why Tobin is so insistent on pretending the bad news isn’t there.

Read the full article here.

As Meillassoux summarizes it, [Mallarmé's poem] Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a mysterious “Master” with one seemingly meaningless final choice: whether to throw a pair of dice. It is never revealed whether he actually does so, and he is pulled into a whirlpool. Along the way, we are treated to an enigmatic vision of a siren who destroys the rock that presumably led to the shipwreck, and various reflections on “the unique Number that cannot be // another.” The poem closes with the suggestion that a new stellar constellation may, perhaps, have been set in motion by the Master’s dice-throw. All of this is presented in a unique layout, with lines stretching across two facing pages, varied typography, and virtually no punctuation.

In Meillassoux’s reading, Mallarmé is reflecting on the task of the poet in the wake of the “shipwreck” of traditional poetic form occasioned by the rise of free verse. Where he breaks with most contemporary interpreters, however, is in seeing Un Coup de Dés as part of Mallarmé’s attempt to create an artistic form that could found a modern ritual with all the power and meaning of the Roman Catholic Mass. This project centered on the composition of a liturgical poem called “the Book” that would be part of a numerologically structured ceremony of public reading.

Many critics view this ambition of Mallarmé’s as crazy and embarrassing, something that he surely got out of his system by the time he wrote his final great work. Meillassoux, however, not only claims that Un Coup de Dés is a continuation of the project of the Book, but that—thanks to Meillassoux’s own investigation, which effectively unlocks the meaning of the poem—Mallarmé has in fact actually succeeded in an achievement that could found a new poetic religion that would be secular modernity’s answer to Christianity.

Stéphane Mallarmé is, in short, a modern-day Jesus, and Meillassoux is his St. Paul.

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In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-­waving and wrist-flapping, along with a certain amount of ass-wagging, introduced his candidate for president of the United States—“my brother, my companion, and my comrade”—Barack Obama. “He’s an eloquent brother,” preached West. “He’s a good brother, he’s a decent brother.” Obama returned the sloppy kiss and pronounced West “an oracle.”

That compliment could not have been more apt, for West regards himself as a prophet more than a professor. He believes that he is called to teach God’s justice to a heedless nation. “There is a price to pay for speaking the truth,” reads the signature on e-mails coming from West’s office. “There is a bigger price for living a lie.” So when his view of the commander-in-chief changed from adoration to disappointment, West was moved to proclaim it out loud. He had already been lobbing rhetorical grenades in the direction of the Oval Office, calling the president “spineless” for his failure to make poor and working people a policy priority and “milquetoast” for kowtowing to corporate interests during the economic crisis. But in an interview with Truthdig, ­published last May, West went nuclear. He called Obama “the black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” And then he said he wanted to “slap him,” as the article put it, “on the side of his head.”

In the white world of mainstream media, the interview made a few headlines. But in precincts of the left, and among certain African-American scholars, it unleashed a tide of anguish. West has been an intellectual celebrity for three decades, protected and cherished by his like-minded comrades, but the nasty tone of his Truthdig comments caused many of his closest colleagues to question their devotion, to suspect his motives, and to wonder whether West’s prominence had finally exceeded his merit. Their concerns were in part pragmatic: As the 2012 election approached, some thought West might make his case better if he weren’t quite so mean.

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