The S.I. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah will host a lecture, “The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology,” on April 11. The speaker will be Mary Evelyn Tucker of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Details are here.
Glickstein on the Ministerial Exception
Jed Glickstein (Yale Law School) has posted Should the Ministerial Exception Apply to Functions, Not Persons? The abstract follows.
In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court confirmed what the lower courts had been saying for some time: the First Amendment prohibits the application of the employment discrimination laws to the relationship between a church and its ministers. Despite Hosanna-Tabor’s significance, however, the so- called ministerial exception remains in flux. For one thing, it is still unclear who will be deemed a “minister” for purposes of the doctrine. The answer to that foundational question may be more complicated than it appears. Thus far, courts and commentators have assumed that ministerial status is binary; a given employee either is a minister (in which case the First Amendment completely bars her suit) or she is not (in which case her suit proceeds like any other). That way of thinking may make sense for the easy cases, but it fits uneasily with the wide range of positions that have been labeled ministerial by the lower courts. This Note accordingly suggests an alternative framework that more closely tracks the functional considerations that underlie the ministerial exception. In short, it argues that a revised exception — one that applies to ministerial functions, not ministerial persons — better strikes the balance between antidiscrimination values and religious liberty that the First Amendment requires.
Asad, Brown, Butler & Mahmood, “Is Critique Secular?”
This month, the Oxford University Press will publish Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury and Free Specch by Talal Asad (CUNY), Wendy Brown (UC Berkeley), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley), and Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley). The publisher’s description follows.
In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood inquire into the evaluative frameworks at stake in understanding the conflicts between blasphemy and free speech, between religious taboos and freedoms of thought and expression, and between secular and religious world views. Is the language of the law an adequate mechanism for the adjudication of such conflicts? What other modes of discourse are available for the navigation of such differences in multicultural and multi-religious societies? What is the role of critique in such an enterprise? These are among the pressing questions this volume addresses.