The Sri Lankan Government has to fulfill its positive obligations under the right to freedom of religion…The right to freedom of religion or belief is a universal right enjoyed by all human beings and therefore by members of all religious communities, whether old or new and whether they have been established in a country for a long time or recently.

In her conclusions, the Special Rapporteur invoked a particular vision of religious freedom that has become dominant among human rights agencies, NGOs, foreign governments, and academics. According to this vision, religious freedom names an ideal social condition that may be reliably reproduced in differing national contexts through the elaboration and enforcement of particular regimes of legal rights—rights which, if properly administered, will protect minority religious communities against majoritarian politics and harmonize diverse religious interests. This vision—which can be seen with particular clarity in documents such as the US International Religious Freedom Act—treats religious rights as apolitical instruments and as legal standards that stand outside of struggles for power and the narrow interests of particular groups. In this vision, religious rights appear as the morals of historical stories, embodying the transcendence or settlement of social discord: they emerge after the Thirty Years’ War, after the American Revolution, after World War II.

However, as several contributors to this forum have pointed out, legal provisions regarding religious freedom do not emerge from history fully formed and self-interpreting. At their core, they are iterations of words and texts, (re)produced and (re)authorized by different persons or groups for different purposes. What they mean depends on local facts.

This contribution expands upon this observation by offering a different story about drafting religious rights in a particular place and time. I will show the ways in which religious rights, as rhetoric, serve not as apolitical instruments, but as indicia of political alliances; not as generic, universalizable norms, but as specific formulations of norms suited to particular moments and in service of particular political programs. In this version of the story, religious rights, rather than conclude conflict and harmonize societies, signpost disagreement.

To see this, one has to begin at the end: to begin with the text of religious freedom provisions and work back. To do so is to treat religious rights not as the solution to the problem of religious strife of persecution, but as a problem itself, or at least as an object to be explained: Why this rendering of rights and not another? Why religious rights at all? Why now?

I explore these questions through a brief illustration from my research on religion and law in twentieth-century Sri Lanka, or, as it was known during the period in question, Ceylon. The “freedom of religion” paragraph in the 1943 “Constitution for a Free Lanka” is similar to provisions for religious freedom contained in other human rights instruments. It reads:

Freedom of conscience and free profession and practice of religion, subject to public order and morality, are hereby guaranteed to every citizen. The [Free Lanka] Republic shall not prohibit the free exercise of any religion or give preference or impose any disability on account of religion, belief or status.

The paragraph was included originally as one of eight discrete paragraphs of “Fundamental Rights” compiled into a “Fundamental Rights Chapter.” Today this paragraph seems unremarkable, even vaguely familiar, a somewhat bland collection of legal guarantees similar to those found in other transnational religious freedom instruments. Yet, in 1943 Ceylon the paragraph was considered not ordinary, but controversial—a carefully crafted protest against empire.

The “Free Lanka” Constitution was a draft independence constitution prepared by a group of Ceylonese politicians who hoped that it might serve as a legal charter under which the British Crown would transfer powers of self-government to a local Ceylonese parliament. Unlike other drafts prepared at the time, it was not produced in consultation with British officials. It was the work of a cohort of young nationalists who rejected the idea that an outgoing British government should “give” to Ceylon the legal charter that announced its independence.

The inclusion of a section on fundamental rights indexed the drafters’ anti-colonialist nationalism. In the 1940s, fundamental rights were taboo for Crown constitution-makers. British legal advisors who participated in the drafting of independence constitutions followed a Colonial Office policy regarding “bills of rights”: they were not to be included. As one influential British constitution-maker of the period put it, “[A]n English lawyer is apt to shy away from [Fundamental Rights] like a horse from a ghost.” Officially, British legalists opposed justiciable bills of rights because they were not part of modern English law and because such rights might undercut parliamentary sovereignty by requiring that future legislators adhere to the political values of the present. Unofficially, the British recognized an inconvenient friction between “bills of rights” and the colonial project as a whole: if the Crown were to acknowledge and entrench fundamental rights as absolute and binding on governments, it would risk exposing the illegitimacy of colonialism more generally, insofar as colonial governments acted without consideration of such rights.

The drafters of the Sri Lankan religious freedom provision recognized this and framed religious freedom as a fundamental right, in part, to amplify its anti-colonialist tenor. In speeches, newspaper articles, and letters to overseas’ organizations such as the Indian National Congress, the drafters directly linked the push for fundamental constitutional rights with the campaign for independence from British rule. These advocates claimed that the British, as participants in the newly-formed allied “United Nations,” were bound by the “human rights” expressed in the “Declaration by the United Nations.” In a manifesto drafted slightly later, the drafters of the Sri Lankan religious freedom provision even outlined a program of “five freedoms” for Ceylon—deliberately echoing Roosevelt’s famous fourfold formulation—of which the first was “The Freedom from Foreign Rule.”

By articulating religious freedom through the idiom of fundamental rights, drafters gestured towards sources of legitimacy that were broader than (if not directly dominant over) the British Crown. They plotted religious rights, and their constitution as a whole, within a legal-philosophical terrain that treated rights not as benevolences extended by rulers, but as guarantees that conditioned the legitimacy of rule itself: governments did not authenticate rights; rights authenticated governments. This alternative approach to the legitimacy and the origin of rights had radical implications. On the one hand, drafters were able to (and did) criticize the colonial government’s legitimacy by accusing it of failing to grant adequate fundamental rights to those who lived in Ceylon. On the other hand, they simultaneously claimed as a fundamental right, “the right to independence and a free constitution.”

The inclusion of religious rights as fundamental rights also targeted a more immediate, local audience. The paragraph on religious freedom was designed in opposition to another paragraph on religious freedom—one framed under the guidance of Ivor Jennings, one of Britain’s leading constitutional scholars at the time and the author of the derisive assessment of fundamental rights quoted above. In a separate constitutional draft, Jennings had proposed to ensure religious freedom by placing certain minimal limits on the lawmaking powers of parliament. In his version, religious freedom was to be secured by preventing lawmakers from enacting bills that would confer advantages or disadvantages on particular religious communities, impinge upon the “free exercise” of religion, or “alter the constitution of any religious body.” When compared with Jennings’ formula, it wasn’t only the inclusion of “fundamental” religious rights that distinguished the nationalists’ draft, it was the nature of the rights chosen. Whereas Jennings rendered religious freedom through a series of negative legislative prohibitions, the nationalists framed religious freedom in terms of positive as well as negative liberties, prescribing not only limits on government’s powers, but guarantees of state protection for religious lives—limits and guarantees that applied not only to legislatures, but to all agents and actions of the Republic.

The politics of rights-writing extend even further. Jennings modeled his religious freedom paragraph on provisions contained in the Ireland Act of 1920, a law ratified by the British parliament, which, while permitting limited Irish “home rule,” maintained London’s claims to the island. In a contrasting move—which would have undoubtedly been recognized by Crown administrators at the time—the nationalists’ paragraph on religious freedom took its language from the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, a document that aimed to establish total Irish independence from the British. As one of the Ceylonese drafters put it, the “Free Lanka” Constitution drew from a text that effected in Ireland “a definitive break with the past” and “conduct[ed] what, in law, was a revolution.”

We can now view the nationalist’s construction of religious rights in a new light: as a polemic against Jennings’ and an invocation of alternate discourses from Europe, the U.S., and India; as a desire to mark particular distinctions and affinities (with Ireland in 1937 and not 1920, with the allied United Nations and not Britain alone); as an effort to treat constitutions not as something given to a nation by colonial governments, but as something claimed by its citizens. The legal syntax of religious rights, read against the grain, historicized, reveals the very thing that rights-discourse obscures: the fragile, contingent, interested, political nature of religious rights, and the embeddedness of rights discourse in larger local, regional, and global struggles for power and control.

The nationalists’ paragraph of religious rights was not included in Ceylon’s independence constitution. And this is part of the story too. What determined the shape of religious rights in 1940s Sri Lanka (and elsewhere in Southern Asia) was not simply a concern with the importance of resolving religious disputes or protecting religious communities, but a concern with making sure that the language chosen signaled the appropriate alliances and echoed the appropriate politics. In Ceylon, where the handover of power occurred exclusively by way of negation with the Crown, colonial politics prevailed over anti-colonial politics and Jennings’ draft, rather than the nationalists’ draft, served as template for the 1948 Ceylon Constitution. In India, where anti-colonial movements had much greater influence on the process of decolonization, a new, more nationalistic constitution (completed by a sovereign Constituent Assembly just after independence) cast religious freedoms in the idiom of fundamental rights. In each case, the rhetoric of religious freedom bears the marks of struggle, perhaps more than resolution. It imprints the politics of the 1940s: the politics of fundamental rights, the politics of colonial resistance, and the politics of constitution-making in the twilight of empire.

Azza Karam

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC project on Religion and International Affairs. Karam here speaks only for herself, not for any institution, organization, or board.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Before we get to your work at the United Nations, let’s start with recent events in Egypt, your home country. How, in your view, is the Egyptian revolution of a few months ago proceeding? Has it been betrayed yet?

AK: It sounds as though you’re waiting for it to be “betrayed”!

NS: No, not at all. I’m wondering what exactly it would mean for the revolution to be betrayed. It seems to be assumed that, somewhere along the way, all revolutions are.

AK: The revolution is proceeding with the hiccups associated with any comprehensive transformation entailing the political, social, economic, and legal overhaul of an entire country. Is the revolution over? On the contrary, we have but begun. Are there disappointments en route? Definitely. But is there a sense that no change is taking place? Not at all. Are we going backwards? Impossible, given the enormity of what has transpired in the consciousness, not only of Egyptians, but of all Arab people. This revolution is, first and foremost, about crossing the Rubicon of fear, about reclaiming dignity, and about the youth being engines of political and social transformation on an unprecedented scale. None of these dynamics are reversible. We are living through the enactment of a new collective consciousness.

NS: Maybe in that sense it can’t be betrayed. But the enactment won’t be easy.

AK: Well, there are the grimy realities of entrenched, interest-based politics; an economy struggling to recover from being on hold while the revolution was taking place, in a global financial environment that is itself struggling to stand on its feet; and a legal system that needs to be overhauled—all while maintaining security and stability in a region being christened, by fire, into freedom.

NS: What was going through your head during the uprising? Were you afraid of what might happen?

AK: I was afraid for the safety of the youth demonstrating so courageously, creatively, and with so much passion. I was afraid for the millions left in the clutches of a government that deliberately instigated instability for the first four days of demonstrations.

NS: And then?

AK: My fear was gradually replaced by several other emotions, starting on January 29, when a series of events began to take place: I allowed myself the first thin line in the crescent of hope when I heard the rumblings of discontent within the Egyptian army itself—rumblings that were articulate and deliberate, and that echoed the people’s demands for both dignity and systemic change. I began to allow myself to smile—and then to grin—when, at the very same time, an Egyptian sense of humor asserted itself in the various venues where demonstrations were taking place—in slogans, attire, and much more. I shook my head in utter disbelief at the camels and horses that were brought in—and felt sorry for them, because of the five-hour journey from the pyramids to Tahrir Square that they had had to endure under whips and ill-treatment. But I wept like an orphan for the people who were dying. I clenched my fists and invoked hell upon those who were deliberately causing the loss of life. I stayed awake night after night, with Egypt’s time defining that of my own life, calling friends and family in Egypt and everywhere else in the world, exchanging information about events, analyzing, hoping, and arguing. Above all, and throughout, I—and every single Egyptian I know, Muslim and Christian—prayed and prayed and prayed. On February 10, when we all expected Mubarak to announce he was stepping down, I literally cursed him—and threw my shoe at his image on my computer screen—as did most Egyptians listening to him across Egypt.

NS: What was it like for you when he finally stepped down?

AK: On February 11, 2011, I was born again as a proud Masriyya—Egyptian—deeply humbled by those ten or twenty years younger than I, but a thousand years more courageous. I kissed my computer screen—the very same one that had just suffered the indignity of having a shoe hurled at it—when Al Jazeera aired the announcement and displayed the unadulterated joy of Egyptians at Mubarak’s resignation. I was amazed, beyond words, at the images of people cleaning up in Tahrir Square. There and then, I prostrated myself in thanks to the Almighty for the beauty of the spirits of the people whom He had enabled. And on the streets of New York City, I held my head up and greeted the Egyptian coffee vendors, hot dog vendors, and commuters loudly, in Arabic, and joked and laughed and shook their hands—for the first and only time in the ten years that I have lived here.

NS: Have you been to Egypt since then?

AK: No, but the enormity of the transformation does not require one’s physical presence within the national boundaries to be appreciated. The Arab awakening in the neighboring countries is itself an indication that the change that has taken place is very much ongoing, and that it is reshaping the identity of the entire region.

NS: Some observers heralded the apparently secular quality of the Egyptian revolution. Do you think that religion will be less on the lips of leaders in the Arab world now than it has been in recent decades?

AK: Secularism comes in many shades and varieties, but it has never manifested—not even here in the United States—in the manner of a total repudiation of religion. A famous Egyptian nationalist leader in the early twentieth century, describing his nationalist aspirations and the struggle against British colonialism, once said: “I am a Copt by religion, a Muslim by culture, and an Egyptian by both and much else.” This multitude of identities, which includes different religious-cum-cultural contexts, has and shall always characterize Egyptians and, indeed, all Arabs. Are we likely to hear less religious talk in Egypt today? I doubt it. After all, why should religion not continue to feature in a country that believes itself to have invented religion in the time of the pharaohs?

NS: How is religion being talked about and thought about at the United Nations? Are there ways in which it is, perhaps conspicuously, not being talked and thought about?

AK: Religion, as an ingredient of culture, has always been part of the business of human development. In the last decade or so, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent reconfiguration of geopolitical dynamics, discussions about religion have begun to occupy a more prominent role in the discourse within and among the various UN agencies. The last two Secretaries-General have referred specifically to the role of faith in several of their speeches, in terms of both culture and faith-based service organizations. More and more UN agencies, beginning with UNFPA, have started to identify faith-based partners in social development, on issues of health, education, child care, nutrition, and the environment. The United Nations system today is more aware of the fact that religious communities, and their affiliated organizational entities, are some of the oldest, most deeply rooted, and furthest reaching social welfare networks and providers known to humanity. They are increasingly recognized as part of the partnerships for development at the United Nations.

NS: How do you help others at the UN to become better attuned to the importance of religion in development work?

AK: What I do is provide technical support to my colleagues at UNFPA, so that they are able to discern the appropriate faith-based partners for our reproductive health, gender equality, and population and development work. My job, then, is to facilitate strategic engagement with the world of religion, as part of the broader culture, in order to further the realization of our human rights mandate. In 2008, many of UNFPA’s faith-based partners were convened to launch the Interfaith Network for Population and Development, a unique human rights-oriented initiative within the United Nations. Several of our UN colleagues joined the deliberations and attended the launch, which took place in Istanbul. Today, there are over 500 member organizations, with a legacy of partnering not only with UNFPA but also with several of its UN sister agencies on a range of development issues. The UNFPA also currently chairs an Inter-Agency Task Force on partnerships with faith-based organizations around the Millennium Development Goals. We come together to share information, coordinate activities, and share experiences and lessons learned.

NS: What lessons has this process taught you?

AK: One thing I’ve learned over time is that these FBOs (faith-based organizations) and “religion” are not one and the same thing. The world of religion is vast and difficult for us to quantify and categorize into neatly distinct entities. Religion and faith do not lend themselves to the usual normative frameworks of development praxis, which means that engagement with religious communities has to be sustainable, built upon common goals, and mainstreamed into broader civil society and government partnerships. This is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust that is required for any such engagement, and for facilitating the co-ownership of national development processes among all the different partners involved.

NS: How do you choose those partners?

AK: The United Nations cannot afford to—nor should it—work with only one faith tradition, or with only one FBO, or with the same religious leaders on all issues. We are obliged to work with varied representatives of different religious organizations and communities on addressing a multiplicity of human development needs. And we have to maintain the same respect and appreciation for the respective strengths and modus operandi of each partner, as long as there is agreement on the basic goals of human development, that is, human rights, peace, and security for all. But we have also learned that the responsibility for cultivating and maintaining these partnerships lies on all sides. Just as we hold ourselves accountable to our intergovernmental boards, mandates, and civil society partners, we expect our FBO partners to do the same with each other, and with us.

NS: Religion seems especially relevant—as a source of controversy, I mean—to the issues of gender, reproductive health, and population that the UNFPA deals with. Do you find the organization’s work to be constrained by religious concerns?

AK: It is not really possible to speak of religious constraints as such. Religious concerns, positions, and services vary significantly according to the religion itself, as well as per country, region, and situation. Issues of reproductive health vary enormously, too. What I can say, almost unequivocally, is that it is virtually impossible to embark on any issue relating to sexuality, women’s rights, and gender relations without coming across particular cultural dynamics. But it would be wrong to assume that particular cultures are unchanging obstacles. If there is one lesson we keep learning from history, and that has been highlighted of late by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is that people change their own cultures from within all the time.

NS: Do you think the revolution represents a sea change in the role of women in Egyptian society?

AK: In my opinion, and contrary to popular (and largely ethnocentric) beliefs, the revolution could happen only because women’s roles in Egyptian society—and Arab societies as a whole—have already been undergoing a sea change. Anyone who has studied Arab societies in the last thirty years will attest to how socially active, politically informed, and economically engaged women have been. The magnitude, scope, and diversity of their participation in the revolution is itself a testament to how intrinsic to the social, economic, legal, and political fabric they already are—and have been. What is now transpiring with women’s rights in Egypt—and elsewhere in the Arab region—is a continuation of the struggle for gender equality within the emerging political framework, which is part and parcel of the larger effort to safeguard all human rights in the new polity that is now being collectively fashioned.

NS: What can people in the West do to help advance the cause of women in the Middle East? Or would it be better to butt out?

AK: Arab women have made it clear they are perfectly capable of activism and of articulating their own needs and aspirations. If and when these women need the assistance of “people in the West,” they will let that be known in no uncertain terms. After listening, the “people in the West” can then decide whether and how best to respond. And it would be wise to do so in consultation with the same women who made the request.

NS: Many have expressed concern that conservative groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, will gain power in Egypt—one assumption being that that would be deleterious to the cause of women’s rights. Is there a chance, then, that things could become worse for women?

AK: It is seriously myopic to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood is “anti-women.” I first started studying the Brotherhood, as part of a range of Islamist formations around the world, back in the late 1980s. Even within the organization itself, there are diverse perspectives on women’s rights: there are extremely active, very well-educated, cultured, and articulate women members of the Brotherhood, just as there are some members who are deeply conservative when it comes to women’s roles in public. Bear in mind that revolutions are happening within almost every group, party, and institution in Egypt today: the army, political parties, universities, professional associations, media, NGOs—you name it. So, even within the Muslim Brotherhood, a revolution continues to unfold among its diverse members—young and old, men and women, and so forth. The journey of these different revolutions is, for everyone concerned, a process of acquiring wisdom, and I believe strongly that we have little to lose and a great deal to gain.

NS: What do you think is the cause of all this upheaval? Why now?

AK: We are living in the context of a generation of youth—which is over 60% of our populations—that has grown up as part of a global youth culture equipped with mass communication technologies and amid huge challenges to established powers. I mean, who would have thought the Soviet Union would collapse; or that religion would re-emerge so strongly after decades of attempts to keep it out of politics; or that a woman and former guerilla fighter would be elected president of the largest Latin American country, and a black man would be elected as president of a country that once went to war with itself over racism? This generation is growing up at a time when even what it is to be a man or a woman is being radically redefined.

Many scholars are unaware of the religious underpinnings of the Declaration. In A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon (who is concluding her service as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See) uncovers the influence of Catholic social thought on this historic document. According to Glendon, certain phrases “have a familiar ring to persons acquainted with the social encyclicals.” Recognizing this connection, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace held a public commemoration of the anniversary attended by Pope Benedict XVI.  In the United States, many Catholics celebrated the legacy of what Pope John Paul II called “one of the highest expressions of the human conscience in our time.” While some liberal Catholics used the occasion to protest the hierarchy’s opposition to gay rights, they have largely shared the Vatican’s support for the Universal Declaration.

By contrast, many evangelicals let the Declaration’s anniversary pass without notice.  A Google News search for the words “evangelical” and “Universal Declaration” yielded just six stories (compared to 133 for “Catholic” and “Universal Declaration”).  While the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today have given increasing attention to human rights (going so far as to cite the Declaration in the past), no mention of the anniversary could be found on their websites.

Why have evangelicals ignored the birthday of the twentieth century’s most profound statement on human rights?  One reason may be evangelical ambivalence about the United Nations. Another may be that some evangelicals regard “rights talk” as an alien language with little connection to Biblical faith.  Raised in the evangelical subculture, I have experienced this attitude firsthand. During my undergraduate years at Wheaton College, one of my professors presented the class with a startling claim:  human rights are a product of modern political thought and cannot be found in the Bible. At the time, I wondered how he could square this statement with the dozens of Bible verses proclaiming the rights of the poor.

In Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Yale University philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a devastating critique of the historical narrative employed by my professor. Drawing on the work of historians Brian Tierney and John Witte, Jr., Wolterstorff argues that the “conception of justice as inherent rights was not born in the fourteenth century or the seventeenth century.” Debunking the notion that natural rights are the outgrowth of philosophical nominalism and the European Enlightenment, he pronounces this narrative “indisputably false.”

Along the way, Wolterstorff critiques the notion that rights talk is an offshoot of modern individualism.  Questioning Stanley Hauerwas’ claim that the language of rights “underwrites a view of human relations as exchanges,” he presents an account of justice that is irreducibly communal. Wolterstorff also takes on those philosophers who would ground their accounts of justice in the classical Greek and Roman descriptions of the well-lived life.  In his judgment, such approaches fail to take into account the inherent worth of human beings.

Rather than treating rights as a modern invention, Wolterstorff traces them back to the early church fathers and the Bible itself. Noting the prominence of the “quartet of the vulnerable” throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, he sees the protection of “widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor” as central to the biblical text. Criticizing those who would “de-justicize” the New Testament, he contends it “is all about justice.” Citing the focus of the Gospels on “lifting up those at the bottom,” Wolterstorff celebrates Jesus of Nazareth’s “expanded vision of the downtrodden.”

Will Wolterstorff’s Biblically-grounded account of justice sway those evangelicals who are allergic to rights talk?  It is possible it will.  Though most laypersons and clergy will not read this book, its rehabilitation of rights may filter down through evangelical colleges and seminaries. Thanks to Wolterstorff, it will be harder for evangelical faculty to dismiss rights as an Enlightenment creation.

As Allen Hertzke documents in Freeing God’s Children, some evangelicals have embraced the global struggle for human rights. Though initially interested in securing the religious freedoms of fellow believers, they have widened their focus to include the campaign against genocide in Darfur and the fight against human sex trafficking in Asia. Whether such evangelical activism represents a new wing of the religious left or the globalization of religious conservatism remains to be seen.  Given Wolterstorff’s history of opposition to the Vietnam War, apartheid, torture, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it is clear that his sympathies lie with the former. Despite these political commitments, he has managed to win the respect of many conservatives.

Wolterstorff may have a harder time convincing secular readers that the “incursion of Scripture into the thought world of late antiquity made possible the rights culture that we are all familiar with.” In the final chapters of the book, he asserts that it may not be possible to provide a secular grounding for human rights, critiquing the attempts of Immanuel Kant, Ronald Dworkin, and Alan Gewirth to do just that. According to Wolterstorff’s 2007 lecture to the American Academy of Religion, “the only adequate grounding is a theistic grounding which holds that each and every human being bears the image of God and is equally loved by God.” Like political philosopher Glenn Tinder’s 1989 Atlantic article, “Can We Be Good Without God?” Wolterstorff’s argument may resonate more with people of faith than with secular scholars.

The fact that Princeton University Press was able to secure a positive blurb from New School philosopher Richard J. Bernstein suggests Wolterstorff may have a shot at influencing the wider conversation about rights. Calling Wolterstorff’s study “the most impressive book on justice since Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,” Bernstein writes that even “those who are skeptical about his theistic grounding of justice will be challenged by the clarity, rigor, and thoroughness of his arguments.”  From 1997 to 1999, Bernstein was a participant in the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education, co-directed by Wolterstorff and historian James Turner. Composed of twenty-eight members from across the humanities and social sciences, it was an opportunity for secular and religious scholars to engage in serious conversation about issues of faith and meaning.  Written in the same spirit of civility, Wolterstorff’s Justice is another effort to bridge the gap between secular and religious understandings of public life.