We were delighted to welcome Princeton University’s Robert P. George yesterday at our law and religion colloquium. Professor George, who serves as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, presented his paper, “Religious Liberty and the Human Good,” a very interesting philosophical exploration of the meaning of religion.
In April, Routledge will release “Church and State in Scotland: Developing Law,” by Francis Lyall (University of Aberdeen). The publisher’s description follows:
The interaction of faith and the community is a fundamental of modern society. The first country to adopt Presbyterianism in its national church, Scotland 
adopted a system of church government, which is now in world-wide use. This book examines the development and current state of Scots law. Drawing on previous material as well as discussing current topical issues, this book makes some comparisons between Scotland and other legal and religious jurisdictions. The study first considers the Church of Scotland, its ‘Disruption’ and statutorily recognised reconstitution and then the position of other denominations before assessing the interaction of religion and law and the impact of Human Rights and various discrimination laws within this distinctive Presbyterian country. This unique book will be of interest to both students and lecturers in constitutional and civil law, as well as historians and ecclesiastics.
In December, I.B. Tauris published “Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Ataturk,” edited by Emine Yesim Bedlek (Bingol University). The publisher’s description follows:
In 1923 the Turkish government, under its new leader Kemal Ataturk, signed a renegotiated Balkan Wars treaty with the major powers of the day and Greece. This
treaty provided for the forced exchange of 1.3 million Christians from Anatolia to Greece, in return for 30,000 Greek Muslims. The mass migration that ensued was a humanitarian catastrophe – of the 1.3 million Christians relocated it is estimated only 150,000 were successfully integrated into the Greek state. Furthermore, because the treaty was ethnicity-blind, tens of thousands of Muslim Greeks (ethnically and linguistically) were forced into Turkey against their will. Both the Greek and Turkish leadership saw this exchange as crucial to the state-strengthening projects both powers were engaged in after the First World War. Here, Emine Bedlek approaches this enormous shift in national thinking through literary texts – addressing the themes of loss, identity, memory and trauma which both populations experienced. The result is a new understanding of the tensions between religious and ethnic identity in modern Turkey.