Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Reinsch on RFRA and the Establishment Clause

Richard Reinsch has a post at the Liberty Fund’s Liberty Law blog discussing the claim (made here by a number of church-state scholars) that RFRA exemptions that impose significant burdens on an identifiable class of third parties violate the Establishment Clause. Richard agrees with me that the argument is not persuasive. A bit from his post involving the baseline from which one argues about what constitutes an entitlement, and therefore an establishment:

So if a religious liberty exemption requires cost-shifting in the manner of employees having to purchase—let’s be clear for Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the objection is to emergency contraceptives like Plan B, Ella, and also IUDs, and not the pill—their own emergency contraceptives, then we have an impermissible establishment of religion. As Eugene Volokh has argued, were the exemption to be granted the employees of Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood would return to the status quo before the mandate came down and one that many employees of companies exempt from Obamacare for various reasons will stay in. That is, if they want emergency contraceptives, well, then, they’ll pay for them with their salaries.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Panel on Tax Reform and Education (Feb 25)

On February 25, the CUNY Institute for Education Policy in New York will host what looks to be a fascinating discussion on tax credits for primary and secondary education–including education in religious schools. Past CLR Forum Guest Ashley Berner (left), the Institute’s Deputy Director, will be one of the panelists. Here’s a description:

For most Americans, “public education” has meant the traditional neighborhood school. That once-unassailable image is changing, however, as states and districts have begun to sanction a wider array of schools such as magnets and charters, and new school funding mechanisms such as tax credits and vouchers – stirring up controversy in the process.

There are important arguments on each side. To its defenders, the dominant model reflects democratic governance structures, advances citizenship formation, is ideologically neutral, and should be preserved with minor adjustments. Innovators, for their side, believe that the expansion of educational options yields better academic outcomes and more diverse classrooms, extends choice to more families, advances pluralism, and aligns the United States’ school system with those of other democratic nations.

New York is now considering a bill that creates an Education Investment Tax Credit to stimulate up to $300 million in charitable donations for public classrooms and for K-12 scholarships for students to attend Catholic, Jewish and other private schools. Please join us for a lively discussion of the bill’s benefits and limitations in light of international education systems.

For details, please click here.

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Chidester, “Empire of Religion”

Next month, University of Chicago Press will publish Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion by David Chidester (University of Cape Town). The publisher’s description follows.Empire of Religion

How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.

In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

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Bearman, et al., “The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics by Peri Bearman (Harvard Law School), Sohail Hashmi (Mount Holyoke College), Khaled Keshk (DePaul University), and Joseph Kechichian (King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies), edited by Emad Shashin (American University in Cairo). The publisher’s description follows.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics provides in-depth coverage of the political dimensions of Islam and the Muslim world. Developments in Muslim societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have highlighted the need for a major reference work focusing primarily on these dimensions. The realization of internal decay and relentless quest for reform, the collapse of the Islamic caliphate, the fall of most parts of the Muslim world under western colonialism, the emergence of nation-states, the dominance of secular ideologies, the rise of Islamic revivalist movements and faith-based political, economic, and social alternatives, the confrontation between Islamic movements and secular inspired regimes have constituted major turning points in the contemporary history of Muslim societies. At no time has the understanding of the nature and implications of these developments been needed more.

Based on the highly acclaimed 2009 publication, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics brings together over 400 new and updated entries to create a single, specialized reference source on this important topic.