The last sentence of the Court’s opinion in Hosanna-Tabor announces the dogma that binds the majority opinion. Affirming for the first time the constitutional status of the ministerial exception, the Chief Justice declares that “(t)he church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.” Not “persons” must be free to choose their own ministers, but “the church” must be free. What is “the church?”
Posts Tagged ‘Catholicism’
January 31st, 2012
“The Church”
posted by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
January 27th, 2012
Brazil’s religious right
posted by Jessica PolebaumIn the Guardian, Tom Phillips profiles Jean Wyllys, Brazil’s first openly gay MP—and explores the growing political voice of the country’s far-right evangelical leaders who oppose him.
January 19th, 2012
Religious freedom defeats secular law
posted by Leslie Griffin
Secular law lost unanimously in the Supreme Court of the United States last week. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal antidiscrimination statute that bars discrimination against employees on the basis of a disability. The ADA also contains an antiretaliation provision that prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who file charges under the statute. The statute itself does not exempt religious employers from liability. Nonetheless, the Court dismissed schoolteacher Cheryl Perich’s ADA retaliation lawsuit against Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School on the grounds that Perich was a minister.
January 4th, 2012
Global Christianity
posted by Wei ZhuThe Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life has recently published a new study on global Christianity.
October 25th, 2011
Are religious institutions entitled to disobey the law?
posted by Leslie Griffin
One recurring justification for the ministerial exception has been the “problem” of women priests. The specter of the Roman Catholic Church being forced to ordain women priests has repeatedly haunted discussions of the ministerial exception. Catholic women priests are wrongly used as a justification for the exception. It was unfortunate that the women priests issue became part of the oral argument in Hosanna-Tabor, as it distracts attention from the more important issues at stake in the exception.
October 13th, 2011
Going to law
posted by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Last week, in the first week of its October 2011 term, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in a suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging the local branch of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church with illegal retaliatory firing of a Michigan parochial schoolteacher under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA mandates an end to discrimination against persons with disabilities across a wide range of contexts and is considered a high-water mark of American civil rights legislation. The Church, supported by a wide array of other interested religious organizations, claims immunity from such legislation.
September 21st, 2011
Der Spiegel interview with Hans Kung
posted by Jessica PolebaumOn the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Germany, Der Spiegel has conducted an interview with theologian Hans Kung, one-time colleague and longtime interlocutor of Benedict XVI, at the University of Tubingen. Kung, in his characteristic style, does not hold his tongue in his criticism of, what he believes to be, the rightward turn in the Catholic Church since John Paul II.
September 12th, 2011
American religion in the era of Fosdick’s revenge
posted by David A. Hollinger
Is bland beautiful? Almost never, most of us would say. But when it comes to religion in a diverse society, the answer may be yes. This is the chief, if probably unintended implication of American Grace, which I take to be the most successfully argued, comprehensive sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. Robert Putnam and David Campbell harvest a generation of research and mature reflection about how religious affiliations of all kinds divide and unite Americans of different generations, regions, sexes, educational levels, and ethno-racial groups.
August 30th, 2011
Understanding resacralization (part 3)
posted by Brandon VaidyanathanShould religious discourse be welcomed in the public sphere, or should we require that it first be translated into secular terms? Part of the concern in the debate is that such translation would be demeaning to religiously-committed people, and that they would be unwilling to do this. But in something like the Rimini Meeting it seems that the opposite is the case—translation into secular idiom may in fact be an attractive prospect to religious groups: an attempt to retain a freshness of content by changing the form, a way to express their way of life in a public forum that might invite those who might otherwise steer clear.
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