The Law and Religion Forum is delighted to host an online symposium this month on Vincent Phillip Muñoz‘s new article, “Two Concepts of Religious Liberty: The Natural Rights and Moral Autonomy Approaches to the Free Exercise of Religion,” which appears in the current volume of the American Political Science Review (May 2016). Among other things, Muñoz (Notre Dame) argues that, from an originalist perspective, the late Justice Antonin Scalia was correct, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), that the Free Exercise Clause does not require the state to grant believers accommodations from generally applicable and neutral laws. The Framers’ version of natural rights constitutionalism, he contends, does not require religious exemptions. The original meaning of the clause thus confirms Scalia’s reading.
Muñoz leads off the symposium with a post today. Throughout the month of September, we will post responses from Gerard Bradley (Notre Dame), Donald Drakeman (Notre Dame), Matthew Franck (Witherspoon Institute), George Thomas (Claremont McKenna), Jack Rakove (Stanford), and Corey Brettschneider (Brown). Muñoz will return at the end to offer his thoughts on the respondents’ contributions. Enjoy!
on race how will that affect the church’s very identity?
ment; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crown’s annual ordinary income. Moreover, as guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England provides the first detailed study of English male monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government’s lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan’s contested project for an Islamic community center.
In The Danielic Discourse on Empire in Second Temple Literature, Alexandria Frisch asks: how did Jews in the Second Temple period understand the phenomenon of foreign empire? In answering this question, a remarkable trend reveals itself—the book of Daniel, which situates its narrative in an imperial context and apocalyptically envisions empires, was overwhelmingly used by Jewish writers when they wanted to say something about empires. This study examines Daniel, as well as antecedents to and interpretations of Daniel, in order to identify the diachronic changes in perceptions of empire during this period. Oftentimes, this Danielic discourse directly reacted to imperial ideologies, either copying, subverting, or adapting those ideologies. Throughout this study, postcolonial criticism, therefore, provides a hermeneutical lens through which to ask a second question: in an imperial context, is the Jewish conception of empire actually Jewish?
