April 10, 2013 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

Prakash Shah (Queen Mary, University of London School of Law) has posted Asking About Reasonable Accommodation in the Context of Religious Universalism. The abstract follows.

Interviews conducted with leading actors in England asking a range of questions about religious diversity and the legal framework and, in particular, about reasonable accommodation, helped identify a number of areas of concern. There was some doubt about whether specific legal provision should be brought in to guarantee reasonable accommodation. However, there was broad support for having the principle adopted in the practice of employers, while some preferred the current informality rather than the principle being enforced through litigation. None of the respondents came up with illustrations outside of Judaism, Christianity or Islam. The results are consistent with recent critical studies showing that the assumption in social sciences that religion is a universal has been imported from theology. Religion-based questions only pick out certain phenomena specific to some cultures and an inevitable skew is created when asking such questions because they only make sense within an Abrahamic religious framework. While enabling the identification of some aspects of culture considered to merit reasonable accommodation on grounds of religion, the results also pose questions about the adequacy of current, standard research methodologies which assume that religion is a universal.

This month, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers will publish Religion in the Public Schools: Negotiating the New Commons edited by Michael D. Waggoner (University of Northern Iowa). The publisher’s description follows.

Since September 11, 2001, the profile of religion’s role in our global society has increased significantly. Religion has long been a force in people’s lives as numerous studies and polls show, yet we continue to struggle with understanding differing religious traditions and what they mean for our common life. There are few places where Americans can meet together to learn about each other and to share in the common construction of our futures. One such place for many is public education.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the complexity of the social, cultural, and legal milieu of schooling in the United States in which the improvement of religious literacy and understanding must take place. Public education is the new commons. We must negotiate this commons in two meanings of that term: first, we must come to mutual understandings and agreement about how to proceed toward a common horizon of a religiously plural America; second, we must work our way through the obstacles in these settings in practical ways to achieve results that work.