Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

UPDATE: Revised Conference Agenda– “International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values”

Here is the updated schedule for our upcoming conference, International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values, in Rome, Italy on June 20-21. If you happen to be in Rome, it would be great to have you!

The Center for International and Comparative Law and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s School of Law, and the Department of Law at the Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta, are pleased to present an academic conference:

International Religious Freedom and the Global Clash of Values

Taking place in Rome on Friday, June 20, 2014, and Saturday, June 21, 2014, the conference will bring together American and European scholars and policymakers to discuss the place of religious freedom in international law and politics. Speakers will address a variety of perspectives. Proceedings will be in English and Italian with simultaneous translation.

Revised Conference Agenda

Friday, June 20, 2014

1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Lunch

2:30 – 2:45 p.m.
Welcome

2:45 – 4 p.m.
Keynote Panel
Religious Freedom in International Law, Yesterday and Today
Thomas Farr (Georgetown University)
John Witte, Jr. (Emory University)
Moderator: Marc DeGirolami (St. John’s University)

4:15 – 5:30 p.m.
Panel 1: The Politics of International Religious Freedom
Pasquale Annicchino (European University Institute)
Heiner Bielefeldt (UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief)
Hon. Ken Hackett (US Ambassador to the Holy See)
Moderator: Margaret E. McGuinness (St. John’s University)

Saturday, June 21, 2014

8:30 – 9 a.m.
Coffee

9 – 10:15 a.m.
Panel 2: Comparative Perspectives on International Religious Freedom
Francisca Pérez-Madrid (University of Barcelona)
Marco Ventura (Catholic University Leuven and University of Siena)
Roberto Zaccaria (University of Florence)
Moderator: Monica Lugato (LUMSA)

10:15 – 10:30 a.m.
Coffee

10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Panel 3: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on International Religious Freedom
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im (Emory University)
Olivier Roy (European University Institute)
Nina Shea (Hudson Institute)
Moderator: Mark L. Movsesian (St. John’s University)

Noon – 12:30 p.m.
Conference Conclusions
Giuseppe Dalla Torre
LUMSA

Location
LUMSA, Complesso del Giubileo
via di Porta Castello, 44 – Roma

Registration
Please register to attend the conference by June 9 at: eventi@lumsa.it

More Information
Monica Lugato | LUMSA Department of Law | monicalugato@lumsa.it
Mark L. Movsesian | St. John’s School of Law |Mark.Movsesian@stjohns.edu

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Langer, “Religious Offence and Human Rights: The Implications of Defamation of Religions”

In July, Cambridge University Press will publish Religious Offence and Human Rights: The Implications of Defamation of Religions by Lorenz Langer (University of Zurich). The publisher’s description follows.

Should international law be concerned with offence to religions and their followers? Even before the 2005 publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons, Muslim States have endeavoured to establish some reputational protection for religions on the international level by pushing for recognition of the novel concept of ‘defamation of religions’. This study recounts these efforts as well as the opposition they aroused, particularly by proponents of free speech. It also addresses the more fundamental issue of how religion and international law may relate to each other. Historically, enforcing divine commands has been the primary task of legal systems, and it still is in numerous municipal jurisdictions. By analysing religious restrictions of blasphemy and sacrilege as well as international and national norms on free speech and freedom of religion, Lorenz Langer argues that, on the international level at least, religion does not provide a suitable rationale for legal norms.

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Howell, “Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past”

In August, Oxford University Press will publish Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past by Sally Howell (University of Michigan-Dearborn). The publisher’s description follows.

Across North America, Islam is portrayed as a religion of immigrants, converts, and cultural outsiders. Yet Muslims have been part of American society for much longer than most people realize. This book documents the history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of the nation’s oldest, most diverse Muslim communities. In the early 1900s, there were thousands of Muslims in Detroit. Most came from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and British India. In 1921, they built the nation’s first mosque in Highland Park. By the 1930s, new Islam-oriented social movements were taking root among African Americans in Detroit. By the 1950s, Albanians, Arabs, African Americans, and South Asians all had mosques and religious associations in the city, and they were confident that Islam could be, and had already become, an American religion. When immigration laws were liberalized in 1965, new immigrants and new African American converts rapidly became the majority of U.S. Muslims. For them, Detroit’s old Muslims and their mosques seemed oddly Americanized, even unorthodox.

Old Islam in Detroit explores the rise of Detroit’s earliest Muslim communities. It documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. Looking closely at this historical encounter, Old Islam in Detroit provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life. It shows how Islam has become American in the past and how the anxieties many new Muslim Americans and non-Muslims feel about the place of Islam in American society today are not inevitable, but are part of a dynamic process of political and religious change that is still unfolding.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Scruton, “The Soul of the World”

From the noted philosopher of aesthetics Roger Scruton comes this new volume,Soul of the World The Soul of the World, published by Princeton University Press, in which Scruton offers a philosophy and a sociology of religion as situated within various worldly, personal, and aesthetic forms and experiences. The publisher’s description follows.

In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive–and to understand what we are–is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defense of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life–and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, the book addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are?

Drawing on art, architecture, music, and literature, Scruton suggests that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s-eye perspective on reality.

Ultimately, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world–one in which we humans are not truly at home. Yet despite the shrinking place for the sacred in today’s world, Scruton says, the paths to transcendence remain open.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Second Circuit Holds that National Motto, “In God We Trust,” on the Currency is Constitutional

In a decision last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit joined four other circuits (the D.C. Circuit, the Tenth Circuit, the Fifth Circuit, and the Ninth Circuit) in upholding the constitutionality of two federal statutes that require that the national motto, “In God We Trust,” be placed on all coinage and paper currency. The court affirmed the dismissal of the complaint by the district court (Baer, J.).

The panel noted that there was some dispute and confusion about the proper Establishment Clause standard to apply in the case. It settled on the Lemon test, which is the “prevailing test in this circuit.” How odd that there is a “prevailing test” in a circuit that may well have been rejected by a current majority of the Supreme Court. And yet while the Second Circuit applied a test whose viability is in question, it also deferred to repeated Supreme Court dicta on the issue, indicating that the motto and its inclusion on the currency is a reference to our religious heritage and therefore satisfies the “secular purpose” and “primary secular effect” prongs of Lemon. The court then saw fit to rely on statements in several dissenting Supreme Court opinions. Even Justice Stevens in his Van Orden v. Perry dissent believed that “In God We Trust” was ok as “an appendage to a common article of commerce” (not quite sure what that means). And Justice Brennan once stated in dissent that “In God We Trust” did not violate the Constitution because the words have lost “any significant religious content” through “rote repetition.” That, too, was claimed by the panel to be persuasive.

The plaintiffs also brought free exercise and RFRA claims. These were rejected as well.

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O’Halloran, “Religion, Charity and Human Rights”

Next month, Cambridge University Press will publish Religion, Charity and Human Rights by Kerry O’Halloran (Queensland University of Technology).  The Religion, Chairtypublisher’s description follows.

For the first time in 400 years a number of leading common law nations have, fairly simultaneously, embarked on charity law reform leading to an encoding of key definitional matters in charity legislation. This book provides an analysis of international case law developments on the ever growing range of issues now being generated by clashes between human rights, religion and charity law. Kerry O’Halloran identifies and assesses the agenda of ‘moral imperatives’, such as abortion and gay marriage that delineate the legal interface and considers their significance for those with and those without religious belief. By assessing jurisdictional differences in the law relating to religion/human rights/charity the author provides a picture of the evolving ‘culture wars’ that now typify and differentiates societies in western nations including the USA, England and Wales, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

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Light, “That Pride of Race and Character”

Next month, New York University Press will publish That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South by Carolinethat pride of race and character E. Light (Harvard University).  The publisher’s description follows.

“It has ever been the boast of the Jewish people, that they support their own poor,” declared Kentucky attorney Benjamin Franklin Jonas in 1856. “Their reasons are partly founded in religious necessity, and partly in that pride of race and character which has supported them through so many ages of trial and vicissitude.” In That Pride of Race and Character, Caroline E. Light examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots.

Light provides a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideals of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. In an effort to combat the voices of anti-Semitism and nativism, established Jewish leaders developed a sophisticated and cutting-edge network of charities in the South to ensure that Jews took care of those considered “their own” while also proving themselves to be exemplary white citizens. Drawing from confidential case files and institutional records from various southern Jewish charities, the book relates how southern Jewish leaders and their immigrant clients negotiated the complexities of “fitting in” in a place and time of significant socio-political turbulence. Ultimately, the southern Jewish call to benevolence bore the particular imprint of the region’s racial mores and left behind a rich legacy.