I’ve put them down over at the Liberty Law blog. A bit:
Making any sense of the inquiry would require adopting some definitions. A burden on religious exercise is a weight on it—or, less, metaphorically, it is simply an interference with religious exercise. “Interfere” is the term used by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in its “Congressional Findings and Declaration of Purpose”: “laws ‘neutral’ toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise.” Interference may be intentional or unintentional, but it is interference in either case. Interference might be compulsion to do or not do certain things, but it also includes any governmental act that would frustrate the claimant’s capacity to exercise his or her religion. A governmental act that interferes with the ability of a claimant to believe or practice his or her faith burdens it.
What about “substantiality”? Here, the text of another religious accommodation statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, suggests an answer: The substantiality of the burden is to be measured against the “system of religious belief” of which the religious exercise at issue forms a part. A system is a group of interdependent items—in this case religious beliefs and practices—that together constitute a unified whole.
This is a small fragment of what will be two longer reflections on the subject: one in an on-line symposium of the Illinois Law Review and another in a player to be named later. More soon.
theology, politics, and ethnicity reveal the sources of the movement’s dynamism, as
analyses papal pronouncements in the context of the substantial and on-going social, political, and economic changes of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, as well the characters and preoccupations of individual pontiffs and the development of Christian theology. She breaks new ground in exploring the other side of the story – Jewish perceptions of both individual popes and the papacy as an institution – through analysis of a wide range of contemporary Hebrew and Latin documents. The author engages with the works of recent scholars in the field of Christian-Jewish relations to examine the social and legal status of Jewish communities in light of the papacy’s authorisation of crusading, prohibitions against money lending, and condemnation of the Talmud, as well as increasing charges of ritual murder and host desecration, the growth of both Christian and Jewish polemical literature, and the advent of the Mendicant Orders.