As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s and Saba Mahmood’s earlier contributions to this discussion remind us, the received wisdom in Western policy circles today emphasizes the necessary synergy between democracy and religious freedom. What I wish to suggest in my remarks here is not that this characterization is wrong, but that it is sociologically too simple, and that the oversimplification can result in ill-conceived prescriptions for pluralist religious freedom.
Posts Tagged ‘religious diversity’
April 20th, 2012
Varieties of religious freedom and governance
posted by Robert Hefner
April 18th, 2012
Contradictions of religious freedom and religious repression
posted by Mathijs PelkmansThe collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seventy years of anti-religious policies—of a period in which religious expression was severely curtailed and religious institutions were always controlled, at times co-opted, and at other times brutally repressed, with the aim of effecting the demise of religion, an aim which was never fully realized. The post-1991 era was radically different, at least in those newly independent countries that adopted and implemented liberal laws regarding religious expression and organization. It might be expected that religious leaders and practitioners would have a straightforwardly positive view of this widening scope for religious activities, but this turned out not always to be the case.
April 13th, 2012
Change over time: A conversation with Robert W. Hefner
posted by David Kyuman Kim
In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia and Shari‘a Politics: Law and Society in the Modern World.
April 12th, 2012
Freeing religion at the birth of South Sudan
posted by Noah SalomonIf you had the opportunity to start from scratch, without the burden of a permanent constitution or an entrenched legal system, if you were, in other words, a founding father/mother of a new-born nation, what relationship would you forge between religion and state?
March 8th, 2012
Charles Taylor on secularism
posted by Wei ZhuOver at the New Statesman, Jonathan Derbyshire interviews Charles Taylor on his new book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience.
February 14th, 2012
There is no such thing as a monoculture
posted by Justin Neuman
“We develop in multi-cultural and multi-religious societies. To say this is to state the obvious. There is no religiously homogeneous society.” Akeel Bilgrami has invited commentary on his recent working paper about the nature and relevance of secularism in which he advances a central thesis that begins with the conditional phrase, “Should we be living in a religiously plural society.” In this post, I offer a response to his thesis convinced, like Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, author of the quotation with which I began, that there is no such thing as a modern religious monoculture.
January 9th, 2012
Normative or empirical comparisons?
posted by Veit Bader
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr confesses that she is not an expert with regard to “the value of normative theory for legal and constitutional concerns, and for political theory.” She rightly thinks that “for empirically grounded comprehension and explanation of societal and political processes, institutions, and practices” the use of normative theory “is limited,” but wrongly attacks normative theorizing as such and also misunderstands my proposal to “replace secularism.” In this brief response, I focus on three issues: first, her criticism of “normative theory” and “value judgments”; second, her krypto-normative remarks on learning from empirical comparisons; and third, her construction of “four types of secularity.”
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