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“European States and their Muslim Citizens: The Impact of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries” (Bowen et al., eds.)

Next month, Cambridge will publish European States and their Muslim Citizens: 9781107038646The Impact of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries, edited by John R. Bowen (Washington University, St. Louis), Christophe Bertossi (French Institute of International Relations), Jan Willem Duyvendak (University of Amsterdam), and Mona Lena Krook (Washington University, St. Louis). The publisher’s description follows.

This book responds to the often loud debates about the place of Muslims in Western Europe by proposing an analysis based in institutions, including schools, courts, hospitals, the military, electoral politics, the labor market, and civic education courses. The contributors consider the way people draw on practical schemas regarding others in their midst who are often categorized as Muslims. Chapters based on fieldwork and policy analysis across several countries examine how people interact in their everyday work lives, where they construct moral boundaries, and how they formulate policies concerning tolerable diversity, immigration, discrimination, and political representation. Rather than assuming that each country has its own national ideology that explains such interactions, contributors trace diverse pathways along which institutions complicate or disrupt allegedly consistent national ideologies. These studies shed light on how Muslims encounter particular faces and facets of the state as they go about their lives, seeking help and legitimacy as new citizens of a fast-changing Europe.

    • Considers the most important institutions in a number of countries: schools, hospitals, the army, courts related to their Muslim citizens
    • Explains how policies about tolerable diversity, immigration, and discrimination are created and applied
    • Combines contrasts across institutions with contrasts across major countries, including France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Norway, and The Netherlands
Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Law and the Academic Study of Religion: Further Thoughts

A few additional thoughts on the convergences and divergences of law and the academic study of religion, prompted by thoughtful emails from legal and ASR scholars Nelson Tebbe and Donald Drakeman.

Methodological Distinctiveness

Both law and ASR may be similar in that they harbor anxieties about their methodological uniqueness and about the autonomy of their disciplines as fields of academic inquiry. In law, this has been a perpetual worry that became particularly acute in the 20th century, as scholars from Pound to Holmes to Posner have argued compellingly for law’s non-autonomy. Indeed, Posner has advocated the project of “overcoming” law: what takes the reins after law has been overcome is economics, philosophy, political science, or some other discipline with truly independent methodological bona fides (it’s mostly economics for Posner). Though it is not my field (and so I hope to be corrected by those who know better), my sense is that ASR has some of these same anxieties but in its case, the anxieties are connected to the conceptual distinctiveness of the subject matter that it studies. Certainly in law, self-justification and disciplinary apology are not unknown.

Practice and Theory: Maintaining or Collapsing the Division?

Both law and ASR have roots as practical endeavors–as trades and professions, rather than as purely academic subjects. For law this is obvious; for ASR the root is theology and ministry. And law schools and divinity schools historically functioned to prepare tradesmen; indeed, both continue to operate primarily to train future practitioners of their respective trades.

My friend Nelson Tebbe points out to me that Yale Law School Professor Paul Kahn notes some of these similarities in his book, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. Kahn’s project is precisely to help legal scholarship get over its past Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Movsesian Essay Appears in New Anthology on Public Religion

This month, Ashgate releases Volume III of Religion in the Public Space, part of its Library of Essays on Law and Religion series. The volume is edited by Silvio Ferrari (Milan) and Rinaldo Cristofori (Milan), and contains essays by, among others, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Mary Ann Glendon, and, I blush to say, yours truly–my essay, Crosses and Culture, on religious displays in the US and Europe. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Religion in the public sphere is one of the most debated issues in the field of law and religion. This volume brings together articles which address some of the more prominent recent cases relating to religion and education, religion and the workplace, family law and religious symbols. The essays discuss the meaning of secularism today and the difficult issue of religion in the public sphere and reflect a wide variety of viewpoints. This volume maps the key elements of this multi-faceted problem, offers essential material and provides an important starting point for an understanding of the issues in this century old debate.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Chapman on Conscience and Religion

Nathan Chapman (Georgia) has posted a new article, Disentangling Conscience and Religion, on SSRN. The abstract follows:

What does “liberty of conscience” mean? Religious liberty? Freedom of strong conviction? Freedom of thought? Since the Founding Era, Americans have used liberty of conscience to paper over disputes about the proper scope of religious, moral, and philosophical liberty. This Article explores the relationship between conscience and religion in history, political theory, and theology, and proposes a conception of conscience that supports a liberty of conscience distinct from religious liberty. In doing so, it offers a theoretical basis for distinguishing between conscience and religion in First Amendment scholarship and related fields. Conscience is best understood, for purposes of legal theory, as a universal faculty that issues moral commands and judgments. This conception overlaps with religion but is not concentric with it. On one hand, conscience may be informed by religious beliefs (or by nonreligious beliefs). On the other, religious beliefs and practices may be entirely independent of conscience. Protecting fidelity to conscience, whether religious or nonreligious, promotes integrity and undermines the government’s pretensions to moral totalitarianism. This conception of conscience is coherent enough to support a legal right and valuable enough to deserve one.

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Amstutz, “Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy by Mark R. Amstutz (Wheaton College). The publisher’s description follows.

Gallons of ink have been spilled in examining the influence of Evangelicals 9780199987634on American politics. Yet the conversation–among pundits, politicians, and scholars–has focused overwhelmingly on hot-button domestic issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. In Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy, Mark Amstutz looks beyond our shores at Evangelicals’ role in American foreign affairs.

Writers have generally traced Evangelicals’ political awakening to the 1970s or, at the earliest, to World War II. But Amstutz digs deeper, arguing that Evangelicals were active in foreign affairs since at least the nineteenth century, when Protestant missionaries spread throughout the world, gaining fluency in foreign languages and developing knowledge of distant lands. They were on the front lines of American global engagement–serving as agents of humanitarianism and cultural transformation. Indeed, long before anyone had heard of Woodrow Wilson, Evangelicals were America’s first internationalists.

In the postwar period, that expertise was put to more organized and sophisticated use, as Evangelicals sought to translate their belief that humans were created in God’s image into a core principle of American foreign policy. Amstutz explores how this principle has been put into practice on issues ranging from global poverty to foreign policy towards Israel, paying close attention to Evangelicals’ triumphs and failures on the global stage.

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Jackson Jr., “Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem”

In October, Harvard University Press will publish Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem by John Jackson Jr. (University of Pennsylvania). The publisher’s description follows.Cover: Thin Description in HARDCOVER

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what “fringe” means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century.

 Moving far beyond the “modest witness” of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the “thick descriptions” of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist’s subject is a self-aware subject–one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer’s offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas–African, American, Jewish–and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Book Event Tomorrow Night

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to RSVP for tomorrow night’s event at the Harvard Club. [Tweet This!] . Marc and I will discuss his new book, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom. Hope to see you there.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

“After” Religious Freedom?: On the Relationship Between the Academic Study of Religion and Law

I am greatly looking forward to participating in a conference next month called, “The Politics of Religious Freedom,” and hosted by four scholars who have been at the forefront of drawing connections between the academic study of religion (or religious studies) and law–Peter Danchin, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.

The title of my panel is “Religion and Politics After Religious Freedom.” With the organizers’ permission, I am posting some comments that I wrote up in response to that subject. My sense is that while there may be some issues specific to the particular interdisciplinary relationship of law and the academic study of religion, at least some of the points I make may apply more broadly to the question of law’s distinctiveness as both a practical and an academic discipline. I welcome your thoughts.

My work considers the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the body of federal and state laws protecting religious freedom in the United States. One theme in my work involves doubt about the law’s capacity to protect everything worth protecting about religion and religious practice. Here the law is limited and imperfect—both because of the limits of human reason and because of the inevitable conflicts of human interests and aspirations. The law’s limits come sharply into focus for what I have called “comic” theories of religious freedom—theories that reduce religious freedom under the Constitution to one or a small set of values (most commonly equality, neutrality, and the separation of church and state). None of these comic theories includes a sufficient accounting of the costs (including the costs to religious freedom) of such a reduction. These are some of the ideas explored in my book, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom.

The topic of our panel is “Religion and Politics after Religious Freedom,” and there are several ways in which my views are sympathetic, and might even converge, with the project of exploring what might come “after” certain conceptions of religious freedom. By reducing the reasons to protect religious freedom under the Constitution to single values such as equality or neutrality, some comic conceptions of it flatten legal disputes in ways that fundamentally misconstrue the true nature of the conflicts within them. Since what goes under the label of religion is culturally contingent, multifarious, and multifunctional—ideological, personal, political, institutional, communal, a phenomenon of cultural identity and at the same time a source of trans-temporal truth—one ought to expect the same variety, conflict, and incommensurability among and within the conceptions of religious liberty cherished by particular communities and enlisted to protect religion under the Constitution.

It may be that legal conceptions of religious liberty not only are insufficiently capacious to accommodate the welter of reasons to protect religious freedom (this would not be a failing unique to this area of law) but are also so grossly inadequate as to demand some radical alternative. We would, in that case, be well-advised to begin thinking about what should come “after” laws and theories that are irredeemably maladapted to the purpose. But before reaching this conclusion, we ought at least to move away from comic accounts of religious liberty and begin to hear the music of religious freedom in a more tragic key—in a way that embraces a plurality of values and that necessarily involves sacrificing ends about which we care deeply.

In other ways, however, my views are in at least some tension with the project’s ambitions to get past, or over, or somehow beyond religious freedom. I suspect that this skepticism about getting beyond religious freedom may relate to broader differences of interest, focus, and purpose between the disciplines of law and the academic study of religion (ASR).[1] To indulge in an overgeneralization (though one that, I hope, captures something true): ASR scholars are interested in dissolving religion; legal scholars are interested in managing it. There are several reasons that the pungent and interesting critique of religion and religious freedom that has developed in ASR scholarship has been relatively slow to affect law and legal scholarship.[2]

Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Conference on Religious Diversity and Governance (Oct. 2-4)

Francisca Pérez Madrid (University of Barcelona) has organized what looks to be a wonderful conference next month in Jerusalem, “Religious Diversity Governance: Territorial and Personal Law.” The conference will take place at Hebrew University from October 2-4. Here’s the description:

Because we regard the places we live as the centre of our legal structure and relations, the concept of law has always been closely tied to the notion of territory. But because our social life extends beyond the relations each person has with a territory and makes us members of larger communities and social groups, we also need to establish systems of peaceful coexistence. While territoriality and personality are therefore dramatically different legal systems, they can still operate side by side as “communicating vessels” which influence and complement one other like two sides of the same coin and two different ways of applying law.

For countries characterised by internal cultural, ethnic or religious diversity, the possibility that we might make the territorial and the personal principle more mutually compatible becomes particularly interesting and this is where the State of Israel occupies a unique position in the world. Maintaining as it does the Millet system of law, which it inherited from the Ottoman Empire and which grants each of the State’s recognized ethno-religious communities exclusive or concurrent jurisdiction in areas of personal and family law, the question becomes the following: Can the application of the personal principle to diverse groups facilitate peaceful coexistence in a plural state?  Our Symposium will seek to answer this and to provide an opportunity to debate the resolution of conflicts in which human rights are put at risk.

The conference program is here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Abercrombie & Fitch Settles Headscarf Lawsuit

An update on the California headscarf litigation I discussed earlier this month. Abercrombie & Fitch has settled the lawsuit and agreed to allow Muslim employees to wear headscarves while on the job. A federal district court in California recently ruled that A&F’s refusal to allow headscarves on the job violated US employment discrimination law. A&F has agreed to pay the plaintiff in the case, Hani Khan, $48,000 and unspecified attorneys fees. The Guardian has the full story, as well as information about other headscarf litigation against A&F.