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Davis & Miroshnikova, “The Routledge International Handbook of Religious Education”

This August, Routledge published The Routledge International Handbook of Religious Education edited by Derek Davis (Baylor University) and Elena Miroshnikova (Tula Leo Tolstoy State Pedagogical University). The publisher’s description follows.

How and what to teach about religion is controversial in every country. The Routledge International Handbook of Religious Education is the first book to comprehensively address the range of ways that major countries around the world teach religion in public and private educational institutions. It discusses how three models in particular seem to dominate the landscape.

Countries with strong cultural traditions focused on a majority religion tend to adopt an “identification model,” where instruction is provided only in the tenets of the majority religion, often to the detriment of other religions and their adherents. Countries with traditions that differentiate church and state tend to adopt a “separation model,” thus either offering instruction in a wide range of religions, or in some cases teaching very little about religion, intentionally leaving it to religious institutions and the home setting to provide religious instruction. Still other countries attempt “managed pluralism,” in which neither one, nor many, but rather a limited handful of major religious traditions are taught. Inevitably, there are countries which do not fit any of these dominant models and the range of methods touched upon in this book will surprise even the most enlightened reader. Read more

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Stanislaw Kunicki, “Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland”

This August, Ohio University Press published Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland by Mikolaj Stanislaw Kunicki (University of Notre Dame). The publisher’s description follows.

 In this study of the relationship of nationalism, communism, authoritarianism, and religion in twentieth-century Poland, Mikołaj Kunicki shows how the country’s communist rulers tried to adapt communism to local traditions, particularly ethnocentric nationalism and Catholicism. Focusing on the political career of Bolesław Piasecki, a Polish nationalist politician who started his journey as a fascist before the war and ended it as a procommunist activist, Kunicki demonstrates that Polish Communists reinforced the ethnocentric self-definition of Polishness and—as Piasecki’s case proves—prolonged the existence of the nationalist Right.

Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

DeGirolami on Hate Speech in America and France

Here’s an interview with CLR’s Marc DeGirolami in France-Amérique on the differences between the legal treatment of hate speech in France and the United States. Check it out (in French).

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Today at St. John’s: Manhattan Declaration Panel

Today at St. John’s, the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn will host a panel discussion, “The Manhattan Declaration Crosses the River: Support the Preservation of Religious Liberty.” Speakers include Marjorie Dannenfelser (Susan B. Anthony List), Robert George (Princeton), Alan Sears (ADF), and Eric Teetsel (Manhattan Declaration). Details are here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 2 Comments

Rights and Judgment

This story reports that the Obama Administration has issued a statement questioning the “judgment” of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in publishing insulting pictures of the Prophet Mohammed (discussed by Mark immediately below).  The Administration — through its “porte-parole” Jay Carney — was careful to distinguish the issue of the magazine’s constitutional “right” to publish the pictures and its judgment in doing so because the Administration “know[s] that these images will be very shocking for many people,” and “might provoke violent reactions.”

The reaction of the Administration reminds me very much of the controversy over the construction of the so-called September 11 mosque in New York City.  I recall distinctly that the position of some at the time was that though there was and surely should be no legal barrier to the use of particular property vaguely proximate to the site of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, it would be unwise, or evince a lack of good judgment, for the rights-holders to exercise their rights.  I recall the cute statement, made somewhere by someone, that it is “not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.”  I also remember that the President came out at first quite strongly in support of the mosque and cultural center (as did Mayor Michael Bloomberg), but then backed off a bit when the issue was put not in terms of rights, but of judgment: ““I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” the President said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.” 

How about it readers?  Are the situations formally identical (with the exception that the President has commented negatively on the wisdom of publishing the cartoons, while he declined to do so with respect to the Ground Zero mosque)?  If so, are there nevertheless other salient differences between them?  Are there categorical differences, for example, between the wisdom of exercising a speech right and the wisdom of exercising the freedom of religion?

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Agent Provocateur

It’s getting hard to keep up with developments surrounding “The Innocence of Muslims,” the YouTube video that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad and has sparked violent protests throughout the Muslim world. On Tuesday, Egypt announced that it had issued arrest warrants for several Americans connected with the film’s production and distribution, including Florida Pastor Terry Jones, who promoted the film. Jones was last in the news for putting the Quran “on trial” and threatening to burn it. Egypt’s action followed Germany’s announcement that it would forbid Jones, who has been invited to speak by far-right political parties, from entering the county. The Interior Ministry argues that allowing the “hate preacher” in the country would upset public order. So that’s another country the pastor must cross off his vacation list.

Then, yesterday, the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, entered the fray over the film, running a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet. The French government, which had asked Charlie Hebdo not to run the cartoons, responded by announcing that it would close embassies in twenty countries this Friday as a precaution. The Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabuis, said the cartoons were “a provocation,” and called on “all” people — by “all,” Fabius presumably had in mind particularly Charlie Hebdo‘s editor, Stephane Charbonnier — “to behave responsibly.”

For his part, Chabonnier is unrepentant. Already under police guard as a result of an earlier episode in which his magazine ran a caricature of the Prophet, Charbonnier says he sees a double standard developing in France, according to which it is considered acceptable to mock some religions but not others. “We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” he explained. It’s an interesting point that other commentators, including in the US, as making, too. Charbonnier should be calling his lawyer. Unlike the US, France has laws that ban speech that insults a group because of its religion. In 2006, in fact, Charlie Hebdo was prosecuted when the newspaper  reprinted some of the infamous cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in a Danish newspaper. In that case, Charlie Hebdo was acquitted on the ground that the cartoons insulted terrorists, not Muslims generally. It wouldn’t be surprising if Charlie Hebdo faced prosecution again now.

Posted on by ddrakeman

Things I Thought I Knew — Part 2: The Simple Cobbler from Connecticut

American statesman Roger Sherman is best known to us for not being very well known.  We find him mostly in collections of works by “Forgotten Framers.”  Or, for those of us raised in the era of the Broadway play and film, 1776,  he is “just a simple cobbler from Connecticut,” whose intellect isn’t up to helping draft the Declaration of Independence.

Mark David Hall’s excellent new book, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (2012), shows us what we’ve been missing by focusing too much attention on the more famous founders.  Hardly just a simple merchant, Sherman was smart, articulate and thoughtful, and he was a deeply religious and intellectually engaged Calvinist in the New England tradition. Sherman’s Reformed Protestant faith was not only important to him, but, thanks to Sherman and his New England colleagues, it ended up contributing as much to American nation-building as the much more commonly credited Enlightenment.

Meanwhile, the original “simple cobbler” from New England is always worth revisiting.  Nathaniel Ward was a Puritan minister who wrote, under a pseudonym, a satiric 1646 essay titled, “The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America.”  The Simple Cobbler sets out a New England view of religious toleration not long after Roger Williams was banished, as follows:   “Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.”

Don Drakeman

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Schielke, “The Perils of Joy”

This October, Syracuse University Press will publish The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt by Samuli Schielke (Zentrum Moderner Orient research institute, Berlin). The publisher’s description follows.

Mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim “friends of God,” have been part of Muslim religious and cultural life for close to a thousand years. While many Egyptians see mulids as an expression of joy and love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, many others see them as opposed to Islam, a sign of a backward mentality, a piece of folklore at best. What is it about a mulid that makes it a threat to Islam and modernity in the eyes of some, and an indication of pious devotion in the eyes of others? What makes the celebration of a saint’s festival appear in such dramatically different contours? The Perils of Joy offers a rich investigation, both historical and ethnographic, of conflicting and transforming attitudes toward festivals in contemporary Egypt.

Schielke argues that mulids are characterized by a utopian momentum of the extraordinary that troubles the grand schemes of order and perfection that have become hegemonic in Egypt since the twentieth century. Not an opposition between state and civil society, nor a division between Islamists and secularists, but rather the competition between different perceptions of what makes up a complete life forms the central line of conflict in the contestation of festive culture.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 3 Comments

Confusion About the Freedom of Speech and Incitement to Violence

I’m having a hard time understanding the claim — if it is a claim, or perhaps it’s just the suggestion of a claim — by some in the media that the video, “The Innocence of Muslims” (discussed by my colleague Mark) is not protected by the freedom of speech.  But I’m not a speech scholar, and the byways of speech law are as byzantine as any in the law.

What is it about the video that would not warrant free speech protection?  I have not watched it, but I believe that the speech here relates to criticism — crude, ignorant, and thoughtless criticism, to be sure — of Islam, Muslim countries, and Muslim people.  I will also assume that it is offensive to Muslims. 

Offensiveness to particular constituencies, including religious constituencies, is not the test for speech protection.  How could it be?  One only has to read the newspaper to see offensive and ignorant commentary about religion and religious people produced all the time.  That speech is clearly protected, and nobody — certainly not the LA Times — would ever suggest otherwise. 

The claim in the LA Times piece seems to be that speech which is intended to incite violence is unprotected.  The author of the op-ed is relying on the exception set out in the Brandenburg case, which permits regulation of speech where (1) the violence or illegal activity is imminent; (2) the speaker intends to cause the violence or illegal activity; and (3) the speech is likely to cause the violence or illegal activity.  But I have questions about this. 

First, what is the evidence that the video’s makers actually did intend to incite violence, as opposed to intending to say something provocative?  In fact, I doubt that anybody intended to incite a violent mob to murder our diplomatic personnel in Libya, but before doing away with speech protections here, I’d like to see the evidence that they did.  Second, what is the evidence of “imminence”?  The best that the op-ed writer can come up with is that the video was published around September 11, and that “the timeline of similar events after recent burnings of religious materials indicates that reactions typically come within two weeks.”  I had not thought that “imminence” is as context-dependent as this author suggests.  In the law of self-defense, imminent means imminent, as in right now, immediate, not two weeks later, or perhaps even later than that.  Third, I’ve always been curious about the third leg of the Brandenburg test.  Why should a greater likelihood that a particular constituency will rise up in violence in response to provocative speech mean that the speech itself is less deserving of protection than speech which targets a constituency which is not likely to react violently to the offense?  Does the third leg of the test not reward the sort of behavior that we have been witnessing?  Does it not stimulate similar behavior?  Perhaps a free speech expert can help me out.

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Hogue, “Stumping God”

In August, Baylor University Press published Stumping God: Reagan, Carter, and the Invention of a Political Faith by Andrew P. Hogue (Baylor University). The publisher’s description follows.

For more than three decades, American presidential candidates have desperately sought the conservative Evangelical vote. With an ever broadening base of support, the Evangelical movement in America may now seem to many a very powerful lobbyist on Capitol Hill. As Andrew Hogue shows, however, this was not always the case.

In Stumping God Hogue deconstructs the 1980 presidential election, in which Ronald Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter and John B. Anderson, and uncovers a disproportionately heavy reliance on religious rhetoric—a rhetoric that would be the catalyst for a new era of presidential politics. Until 1980, the idea that conservative politics was somehow connected with conservative theology was distant from the American imagination. Hogue describes the varying streams of influence that finally converged by the Reagan-Carter election, including the rapidly rising Religious Right. By 1980, candidates were not only challenged to appeal rhetorically to a conservative religious base, but found it necessary to make public their once-private religious commitments.

In compelling and illuminating fashion, Stumping God explains the roots of modern religious politics and encourages readers to move beyond the haze of rhetorical appeals that—for better or worse—continually clouds the political process.