At its March 2012 meeting, the Administrative Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty: A Statement on Religious Liberty,” a document drafted by the USCCB’s Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.
Posts Tagged ‘gender’
May 3rd, 2012
Secularism and the freedom to transform lives
posted by Samia HuqIn this post I explore the case of Bangladesh: the state of secularism there and the tensions and polemics that accompany the pursuit of an ideal secular state and society. I do this by reflecting on reactions surrounding women’s turn to greater religious engagement fostered through their participation in Quranic discussion circles in Dhaka. In outlining some of the tensions underlying the reactions, I wish to draw attention to the stakes of remaining confined to a binary view of religion and secularism, especially as new religious forces and faces come into the public space with the intent of developing and transforming it.
April 30th, 2012
Mary’s voice
posted by Taline CoxIn the wake of controversy over the Vatican’s recent rebuke of American nuns’ activities and announcement of plans to reorganize the Leadership Council of Women Religious, Lisa Miller urges the Church to project Mary’s voice.
February 23rd, 2012
Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
posted by Taline CoxLila Abu-Lughod and Anumpama Rao—editors of Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent, a special issue of SocialDifference-Online—sat down for a conversation with the editors of Jadaliyya.
February 14th, 2012
Love, InshAllah
posted by Wei ZhuOver at the New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar writes about the recently published Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi.
August 17th, 2011
Religious liberty, minorities, and Islam: An interview with Saba Mahmood
posted by Nathan Schneider
Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose work raises challenging questions about the relationship between religion and secularism, ethics and politics, agency and freedom. Her book Politics of Piety, a study of a grassroots women’s piety movement in Cairo, questions the analytical and political claims of feminism as well as the secular liberal assumptions on the basis of which such movements are often judged. In the volume Is Critique Secular? she joins Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown in rethinking the Danish cartoon controversy as a conflict between blasphemy and free speech, between secular and religious world views. Now, Mahmood is working on a comparative project about the right to religious liberty and minority-majority relations in the Middle East. We spoke over breakfast in New York City.
March 3rd, 2011
Egypt’s revolution and the new feminism
posted by Margot Badran
The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.
January 26th, 2011
What is Oprah?: An interview with Kathryn Lofton
posted by Nathan Schneider
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, just out from University of California Press, Yale religion professor Kathryn Lofton orchestrates an encounter between American religious history and daytime television. Oprah Winfrey and the media empire that bears here name, Lofton finds, bear the rudiments of modern, neoliberal womanhood, conveyed through a resolutely non-religious spirituality.
November 19th, 2010
“Women, Family, and Society in Islam and Catholicism”
posted by Jessica PolebaumThe University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies concluded the New York City launch of its new research initiative, Contending Modernities, this morning with a four-woman panel discussion on “Women, Family, and Society in Islam and Catholicism.”
October 12th, 2010
Peace from the ground up: An interview with Myla Leguro
posted by Nathan Schneider
After spending two years earning her master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies—and having previously been a visiting fellow at the Institute—Myla Leguro recently returned to her native Mindanao, a violence-ridden island in the southern Philippines. There, for more than two decades, she has been working for Catholic Relief Services to forge peaceful relationships between rival indigenous, Muslim, and Christian groups, as well as the government in Manila. For Leguro, practice comes before theory, and the local precedes the national and the global. When she thinks about religion, too, practical, context-specific steps toward getting different communities talking with each other trump concerns about abstract doctrines or clashing civilizations.
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