Download or read book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State written by Russell Blackford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.
Download or read book Religious Freedom and the Constitution written by Christopher L. Eisgruber and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty. Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.
Download or read book Religious Freedom written by Tisa Wenger and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.
Download or read book Freedom of Religion or Belief written by Paul T. Babie and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the metaphor of ‘constitutional space’, this thought-provoking book describes the confluence and convergence of powers in a constitutional system, comprised of the principled exercise of the legislative, executive and judicial powers of constitutional government. Addressing the issues surrounding the freedom of religion or belief, the book explores the dimensions of constitutional space and the content of this freedom, as well as comparative approaches to defining and protecting this freedom.
Download or read book Religious Freedom and the Law written by Brett G. Scharffs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a timely analysis of some of the current controversies relating to freedom for religion and freedom from religion that have dominated headlines worldwide. The collection trains the lens closely on select issues and contexts to provide detailed snapshots of the ways in which freedom for and from religion are conceptualized, protected, neglected, and negotiated in diverse situations and locations. A broad range of issues including migration, education, the public space, prisons and healthcare are discussed drawing examples from Europe, the US, Asia, Africa and South America. Including contributions from leading experts in the field, the book will be essential reading for researchers and policy-makers interested in Law and Religion.
Download or read book I Am Not Afraid are You written by Mrs. Marilla M. Ricker and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Freedom of Religion or Belief written by Silvio Ferrari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of religion is an issue of universal interest and scope. However, in the last two centuries at least, the philosophical, religious and legal terms of the question have been largely defined in the West. In an increasingly global world, widening our knowledge of this right’s roots in different cultural and legal systems becomes a priority. This Handbook seeks to attain this goal through a better understanding of the historical roots and expressions of the right to freedom of religion on the one hand and, on the other, of its theological background in different religious traditions. History and theology provide the setting for the analysis of the politics of freedom of religion, that is, how this right is used in the context of the dialogue/confrontation between countries placed in different cultural regions of the world, and of the legal strategies and tools that have been developed and are employed to protect and foster the right to freedom of religion. Behind these legal and political strategies, there is an ongoing debate about the nature of this right, whose main features are explored in the final section. Global, historical and interdisciplinary in approach, this book studies the new relevance of freedom of religion worldwide and develops suitable categories to analyze and understand the role that freedom of religion can play in managing religious and cultural diversity in our societies. Authored by experts, through the contributions collected in these chapters, scholars and students will be able to broaden and deepen their knowledge of the right to freedom of religion and to develop the ability to go beyond the borders of the different cultural environments in which this right took shape and developed.
Download or read book Endowed by Our Creator written by Michael I. Meyerson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate over the framers' concept of freedom of religion has become heated and divisive. This scrupulously researched book sets aside the half-truths, omissions, and partisan arguments, and instead focuses on the actual writings and actions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Legal scholar Michael I. Meyerson investigates how the framers of the Constitution envisioned religious freedom and how they intended it to operate in the new republic. Endowed by Our Creator shows that the framers understood that the American government should not acknowledge religion in a way that favors any particular creed or denomination. Nevertheless, the framers believed that religion could instill virtue and help to unify a diverse nation. They created a spiritual public vocabulary, one that could communicate to all—including agnostics and atheists—that they were valued members of the political community. Through their writings and their decisions, the framers affirmed that respect for religious differences is a fundamental American value, Meyerson concludes. Now it is for us to determine whether religion will be used to alienate and divide or to inspire and unify our religiously diverse nation.
Download or read book Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief A Deskbook written by W. Cole Durham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 1072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world enters the 21st Century, the challenges in implementing freedom of religion or belief grow more complex and more acute. How can the internationally recognized norms regarding freedom of religion or belief be meaningful for all - women and men, majorities and minorities, established religions and new religious movements, parents and children? How can tolerance, mutual respect and understanding be globally expanded? How does freedom of religion or belief relate to other human rights? Launched by the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, this deskbook anthology is designed as a single-volume resource for all who are concerned with facilitating improved global compliance with international standards in this vital area. The varied and diverse topics addressed by over fifty global experts in the field provide a rich weave of many threads. The book addresses historical and philosophical background on religious human rights, applicable international norms and the international procedural mechanisms for safeguarding these norms. It surveys central areas of controversy, including registration of religious and belief organizations, emerging debates on religion and gender, parental and children's rights, new religious movements, proselytism, and conscientious objection. Other chapters describe practical approaches to promoting tolerance and understanding through education, inter-religious dialogue, joint religious efforts addressing shared social problems, and conflict resolution initiatives. The volume also provides practical information regarding networking and other background issues that can help translate understanding of the applicable norms and procedures into action. Appendices provide texts of major international instruments on freedom of religion or belief.
Download or read book The Production of American Religious Freedom written by Finbarr Curtis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either “religion” or “freedom.” Rather than resolve these debates, Finbarr Curtis argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power. The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X’s more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. The volume argues that religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.
Download or read book Religious Freedom written by John A. Ragosta and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jefferson’s expansive vision—including his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of government—enjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson "demonstrably incorrect." Since then, Rehnquist’s call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion. In Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defense of Jefferson’s advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jefferson’s own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jefferson’s views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendment’s focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.
Download or read book The Tragedy of Religious Freedom written by Marc O. DeGirolami and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to questions of religion, legal scholars face a predicament. They often expect to resolve dilemmas according to general principles of equality, neutrality, or the separation of church and state. But such abstractions fail to do justice to the untidy welter of values at stake. Offering new views of how to understand and protect religious freedom in a democracy, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom challenges the idea that matters of law and religion should be referred to far-flung theories about the First Amendment. Examining a broad array of contemporary and more established Supreme Court rulings, Marc DeGirolami explains why conflicts implicating religious liberty are so emotionally fraught and deeply contested. Twenty-first-century realities of pluralism have outrun how scholars think about religious freedom, DeGirolami asserts. Scholars have not been candid enough about the tragic nature of the conflicts over religious liberty—the clash of opposing interests and aspirations they entail, and the limits of human reason to resolve intractable differences. The Tragedy of Religious Freedom seeks to turn our attention from abstracted, absolute values to concrete, historical realities. Social history, characterized by the struggles of lawyers engaged in the details of irreducible conflicts, represents the most promising avenue to negotiate legal conflicts over religion. In this volume, DeGirolami offers an approach to understanding religious liberty that is neither rigidly systematic nor ad hoc, but a middle path grounded in a pluralistic and historically informed perspective.
Download or read book Liberty in the Things of God written by Robert Louis Wilken and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how "the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day."
Download or read book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.
Download or read book Freedom of Religion written by Stephen A. Smith and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 James Madison Prize for Outstanding Research in First Amendment Studies. What are the arguments for and against government restrictions on religious beliefs and practices? To what extent can or should government support religion? Why is religious liberty important? Now a comprehensive anthology comprising 300 important writings on religious liberty is available to address and examine these questions, and Smith provides the important historical grounding and philosophical positions that guide readers through these significant selections. It will remain a significant reference work to facilitate reasoned discussions of freedom of religion, whether for education or advocacy, in the classroom or the public sphere. This outstanding collection should be in every library and on the desk of anyone seeking to understand or shape public policies affecting religious liberty.
Download or read book The Myth of American Religious Freedom written by David Sehat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.
Download or read book Freedom of Religion or Belief written by Heiner Bielefeldt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violations of religious freedom and violence committed in the name of religion grab our attention on a daily basis. Freedom of religion or belief is a key human right: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, numerous conventions, declarations and soft law standards include specific provisions on freedom of religion or belief. The 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief has been interpreted since 1986 by the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. Special Rapporteurs (for example those on racism, freedom of expression, minority issues and cultural rights) and Treaty Bodies (for example the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Committee on the Rights of the Child) have also elaborated on freedom of religion or belief in the context of their respective mandates. Freedom of Religion or Belief: An International Law Commentary is the first commentary to look comprehensively at the international provisions for the protection of freedom of religion or belief, considering how they are interpreted by various United Nations Special Procedures and Treaty Bodies. Structured around the thematic categories of the United Nations Special Rapporteur's framework for communications, the commentary analyses, for example, the limitations on the wearing of religious symbols and vulnerable situations, including those of women, detainees, refugees, children, minorities and migrants, through a combination of scholarly expertise and practical experience.
