Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Also, They Will Need to Use Electric Typewriters

This is rather silly. Inside Higher Ed reports that the International Studies Association–according to its website, “the most respected and widely known scholarly association dedicated to international studies”–has proposed a ban on personal blogging by editors of its journals. The proposal would allow editors to blog only at official sites affiliated with their journals. The ISA’s President says the association is concerned about the lack of professionalism at many academic blogs and that it doesn’t want readers to confuse editors’ personal posts with the association’s official products.

Maybe international studies blogs tend to tackiness, I don’t know. But I can’t see how a scholarly association would think to ban personal blogging in the year 2014. Leave aside for the moment concerns about academic freedom. Blogs serve a useful academic function. Sure, blogs aren’t the same thing as long-form scholarship; a writer can’t fully develop ideas in the blogging format. But blogs allow scholars to carry on helpful conversations with colleagues across the world and to engage the wider public as well. They can highlight current issues that merit further study. And blogs can be equalizers for scholars from smaller and less well-known institutions. Scholars who would never be asked on PBS’s News Hour can use blogs as a way to get their ideas out and influence debate. It would be wrong to lose these benefits because of a vague concern about professionalism. If the ISA is having trouble with editors who post childish comments on personal blogs–apparently, this is one of the reasons the association has proposed the ban–it ought to speak to those editors directly, rather than adopt a blanket prohibition. (H/T: Instapundit).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

If you read only one amicus brief in the Hobby Lobby case…

Read this brief authored by Douglas Laycock on behalf of the Christian Legal Society and several other groups. Professor Laycock was right in the center of the legislative debates over the meaning of RFRA in the 1990s. In exploring the meaning of RFRA and its application, the brief describes those debates in very helpful detail, and it also discusses the legislative history of the Religious Liberty Protection Act, a statute that was in the offing (but ultimately was never passed, though portions of it made their way into the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and portions were used to strengthen RFRA) after the Supreme Court struck down RFRA as applied against the states as in excess of Congress’s enforcement powers under section 5 of the 14th Amendment. Laycock demonstrates that Congress clearly intended RFRA (as well as RLPA) to apply to for-profit corporations, and reflected that intention in the words of the statute. There were many special interests that desired exemptions from RFRA. Those exemptions were rejected.

The Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases are, at bottom and after the swirling political fog is blown away, about the meaning of a statute. Professor Laycock’s brief is an important contribution in ascertaining that meaning. Here is the summary of the argument:

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides universal coverage. It applies to “all” federal law and to “all” cases where the free exercise of religion is substantially burdened.

The legislative history confirms the universality of the statutory text. The sponsors resisted all efforts to add exceptions to coverage. A definition in an early version of the bill, limiting coverage to “natural persons” and religious organizations, was eliminated in all later drafts.

After this Court invalidated RFRA as applied to the states, Congress sought to re-enact RFRA’s standard, in substantively identical language, for application to cases that could be reached under the Commerce and Spending Clauses. The debates on this bill, the Religious Liberty Protection Act (RLPA), reveal the public meaning of the nearly identical language in RFRA. The RLPA debate is highly probative because it was a serious fight on a live issue. It was not in any sense an attempt to make post enactment legislative history about RFRA, but it clearly demonstrates the public meaning of RFRA’s language.

Read more

Posted on by JCPW

Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

Posted on by JCPW

Whitt, “Bringing God to Men”

whitt_bringing_PBThis February, The University of North Carolina Press will publish Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War by Jacqueline E. Whitt (Air War College). The publisher’s description follows.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the American military chaplaincy underwent a profound transformation. Broad-based and ecumenical in the World War II era, the chaplaincy emerged from the Vietnam War as generally conservative and evangelical. Before and after the Vietnam War, the chaplaincy tended to mirror broader social, political, military, and religious trends. During the Vietnam War, however, chaplains’ experiences and interpretations of war placed them on the margins of both military and religious cultures. Because chaplains lived and worked amid many communities–religious and secular, military and civilian, denominational and ecumenical–they often found themselves mediating heated struggles over the conflict, on the home front as well as on the front lines.

In this benchmark study, Jacqueline Whitt foregrounds the voices of chaplains themselves to explore how those serving in Vietnam acted as vital links between diverse communities, working personally and publicly to reconcile apparent tensions between their various constituencies. Whitt also offers a unique perspective on the realities of religious practice in the war’s foxholes and firebases, as chaplains ministered with a focus on soldiers’ shared experiences rather than traditional theologies.

Posted on by JCPW

Khalid, “Islam After Communism”

9780520282155This February, the University of California Press will publish Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia by Adeeb Khalid (Carleton College). The publisher’s description follows.

How do Muslims relate to Islam in societies that experienced seventy years of Soviet rule? How did the utopian Bolshevik project of remaking the world by extirpating religion from it affect Central Asia? Adeeb Khalid combines insights from the study of both Islam and Soviet history to answer these questions. Arguing that the sustained Soviet assault on Islam destroyed patterns of Islamic learning and thoroughly de-Islamized public life, Khalid demonstrates that Islam became synonymous with tradition and was subordinated to powerful ethnonational identities that crystallized during the Soviet period. He shows how this legacy endures today and how, for the vast majority of the population, a return to Islam means the recovery of traditions destroyed under Communism.

Islam after Communism reasons that the fear of a rampant radical Islam that dominates both Western thought and many of Central Asia’s governments should be tempered with an understanding of the politics of antiterrorism, which allows governments to justify their own authoritarian policies by casting all opposition as extremist. Placing the Central Asian experience in the broad comparative perspective of the history of modern Islam, Khalid argues against essentialist views of Islam and Muslims and provides a nuanced and well-informed discussion of the forces at work in this crucial region.