This afternoon’s first panel was “Religious Freedom in the Contemporary Juridical Context,” chaired by Francisca Pérez Madrid of the University of 
Barcelona. (UPDATE: That’s a picture of the panel, left, with conference organizer Mary Ann Glendon). I opened the panel with a comparative paper on recent cases in the American Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights on the question of state-sponsored religious displays. Although both courts emphasize the need for state “neutrality,” they define neutrality differently, and I argue that the differences reflect underlying institutional and cultural factors. Hans-Martien ten Napel (Leiden University) followed with a paper on theoretical justifications for religious freedom, including church autonomy. He argued that Christian social pluralist thought, both Catholic and Protestant, can provide an institution-sensitive account of religious freedom that avoids some of the pitfalls of conventional individualistic accounts. Iain Benson (Miller Thompson LLP, Canada) spoke next. In a satiric paper, he explored rhetorical devices used by opponents of church autonomy, for example, referring to “public” as distinct from “religious” and treating “secular” as a neutral, ahistorical concept. Pasquale Annicchino (European University Institute) followed with a paper on the need for a religious freedom office within the new European External Action Service, an EU diplomatic corps established by the Treaty of Lisbon. This new service, he argued, which would advocate for religious freedom outside Europe, could be modeled on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Pérez Madrid closed the panel with a paper on a recent General Comment by the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which requires states to promote citizens’ participation in cultural life. Issued in 2009, the General Comment notes that “culture” encompasses, among other things, religion and belief systems; although it must be reinforced in some ways, Pérez Madrid maintained, the General Comment’s approach to religion as a matter of culture was basically sound.
Liveblogging the Religion and Civil Society Conference: Glendon
I’m here today at this year’s Religion and Civil Society Conference, “The Changing Faces of ‘Religion’ and ‘Secularity,’” organized by the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra and hosted by Harvard Law School. This morning’s first speaker was Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon, who opened the conference by offering a helpful roadmap of the current social science literature regarding secularization.
Glendon argued against simplistic evaluations of religion’s place in civil society. Organized religion does seem to be in decline in the West, as the old secularization theory predicted, but there is also an upsurge in “political religion” in many parts of the world. She identified four new, competing “grand narratives” regarding secularization: (1) the “New Atheism” of writers like Hitchens, which celebrates the decline of religion; (2) the “Melancholy Secularism” of Habermas and Pera, which agrees that religion is in decline but views this as a sorry development that will lead to the abandonment of the Judeo-Christian values that support classical liberalism; (3) the “Cultural Secularism” associated with Charles Taylor, which describes, in a more or less detached way, a society in which religious belief is only one option among many; and (4) the “Positive Secularism” of Pope Benedict XVI, which advocates state neutrality, not hostility, toward religion. Ironically, Glendon noted, this last version, championed by the Catholic Church today, shows more sympathy for the Enlightenment value of religious liberty than the New Atheism, which sees itself as the heir of the Enlightenment. She closed with some reflections on the role of social scientists in assessing the contemporary place of religion in society.
Tomorrow at Harvard Law
I’ll be participating tomorrow in “The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity,” a conference taking place at Harvard Law School. The program is here. CLR Friends in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello.
Greetings from Chicago
Conference: The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity
A quick announcement for a wonderful looking conference to be held at Harvard Law School on June 7-8, The Changing Faces of Religion and Secularity, organized by the Universidad de Navarra in Spain. The program is international in scope and includes some terrific speakers — Mary Ann Glendon, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Russell Hittinger, among many others. CLR Director Mark Movsesian will be presenting his paper, Crosses and Culture: State-Sponsored Religious Displays in the United States and Europe.
Conference on Illegal Covering (Onanti, Spain)
The International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Onanti, Spain will hold a conference, “‘Illegal’ Covering: Comparative Perspectives on Legal and Social Discourses on Religious Diversity,” this Thursday and Friday, May 17-18. The conference organizers are Valerie Amiraux (University of Montreal) and Pascale Fournier (University of Ottawa). For details, follow the links here.
Putting the Legal in Religious Legal Theory
I just finished reading Samuel Levine’s essay RLT: A Preliminary Examination of Religious Legal Theory as a Movement, which considers the challenges facing the creation of a Religious Legal Theory (RLT) movement akin to Critical Legal Studies, Law & Economics and Empirical Legal Studies. As Levine notes, the growing – and, to mind, successful – Religious Legal Theory conferences (the three annual RLT conferences thus far have been held at Seton Hall, St. John’s and Pepperdine) indicates that there is a conglomeration of research and scholarship revolving around some central concept captured by the label “religious legal theory.”
Among the challenges to the RLT movement detailed by Levine, I was most drawn to the tension between the pluralism embedded within RLT – it brings together different methodologies, disciplines and faith perspectives – and the need for a movement to advance a “foundation of meaningful concepts” in order to retain coherence, integrity and longevity.
As I’ve thought about this challenge, I’ve wondered whether RLT can do more to capitalize on the legal within religious legal theory. By that I mean, further focus its efforts on the ways in which religion and religious life incorporates legal structures and norms. This inquiry might itself be described as two-fold: to what extent does religious life mimic that of a legal system – and how might those similarities impact the nation-state’s treatment of religion. As example, RLT might further explore the methods of authority, interpretation, and norm-creation within religious communities and compare those methods to compare to other legal structures. Moreover, to the extent religion and law share important similarities, questions of accommodation, deference and enforcement might require considering religion alongside, for example, international law and foreign law where the nation-state has contemplated navigating the competing claims of conflicting legal norms. Such an approach would incorporate insights of legal pluralism, international legal theory, political philosophy, and indigenous law into the RLT movement.
This is not to say that this isn’t already happening; to the contrary, there is growing amount of writing on this very issue – and probably more to come in light of the Supreme Court’s recent pronouncements in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC. Some examples that come to mind – just to name a few – include Paul Horwitz’s work on First Amendment Institutions (here and here), Joel Nichols recent book Marriage and Divorce in a Multicultural Context, Ayelet Shacher’s book Multicultural Jurisdictions, Perry Dane’s work on church autonomy and legal pluralism (see, e.g., here and here), Rick Garnett’s work on religious institutions, (see, e.g., here and here), Chaim Saiman’s Jesus Legal Theory, and Mark Movsesian’s Fiqh and Canons: Reflections on Islamic and Christian Jurisprudence.
Consider this a pitch for more of the same and for moving this focus into the center of the RLT movement.
Liveblogging the RALS Conference
I’m posting today from the biannual Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools (RALS), hosted this year by Sam Levine at Touro. The first panel this morning, on which I participated, was titled “The Place of Law and Religion Institutes in the Law School and University.” The panel made clear how many such institutes exist in American law schools and how diverse are their interests. I spoke about our Center for Law and Religion here at St. John’s. Our center focuses on religion as a legal and sociological phenomenon and treats the subject from a broadly interfaith and comparative perspective. Elizabeth Schiltz, director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy at St. Thomas, described her center as having a slightly different focus, rooted more specifically in the Catholic intellectual and legal tradition. Elizabeth Clark, associate director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU, described her center’s primary concern as promoting religious freedom around the world. Of course, there is a lot of overlap in the matters the centers cover. Yet the diversity of focus is a great sign that law and religion is a growth area in American law schools and that there is plenty of work to go around.
Religiously Affiliated Law Schools Conference at Touro Law Center
Starting this afternoon, Touro Law Center will be hosting the 2012 Religiously Affiliated Law Schools Conference, which will explore “The Place of Religion in the Law School, the University, and the Practice of Law.” The conference was organized by Samuel Levine who put together a fantastic program. Highlights of the program include keynote speaker Nathan Lewin, plus presentations by some of the very best in the law & religion field (including CLR Forum’s own Mark Movsesian and Pepperdine University School of Law’s Dean Deanell Tacha).
If you’re able to go (which I regretfully am not), I’d strongly recommend attending this impressive event.
Panel: The Original Source of Law (May 9)
The Crossroads Cultural Center will host a panel discussion, “The Original Source of Law: The Individual? The State? God?”, at NYU on May 9. The panel will address natural law, both as a general concept and in its practical implications. Speakers include Robert George (Princeton) and Andrea Simoncini (Florence). Details are here.