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Roberts, “Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism”

This month, Columbia University Press publishes Encountering Religion: encountering religionResponsibility and Criticism After Secularism by Tyler Roberts (Grinnell College).  The publisher’s description follows.

Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon the conceptual opposition between “secular” and “religious” to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. The artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical “academic study of religion” and an ideological and authoritarian “religion,” he argues, only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, Roberts calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of “encounter” and “response,” illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. 

To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds, and scholars must confront questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. Roberts refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. In humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious, and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.

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Tebbe (ed.), “Religion and Equality Law”

This June, Ashgate Publishing will publish Religion and Equality Law edited by Nelson Tebbe (Brooklyn Law School). The publisher’s description follows.

The essays selected for this volume address topics at the intersection of religion and equality law, including discrimination against religion, discrimination by religious actors and discrimination in favor of religious groups and traditions. The introduction provides a conceptual guide to these types of inequality – which are often misunderstood or conflated – and it offers an analysis of different species of discrimination within each broad category. Each section of the volume contains both theoretical essays, which set out frameworks for thinking about the relevant type of inequality, and essays that examine real-world disputes. For example, the articles address the conflicts over headscarf laws in France and Turkey, the place of so-called traditional religions in Africa, the display of Roman Catholic crucifixes in Italian classrooms, and the ability of American religious organizations to be free of employment laws in their treatment of clergy. This volume brings together classic articles which are otherwise difficult to access, enables students to study key articles side-by-side, and provides instructors with a valuable teaching resource.

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Elliott on Religion in Northern Ireland

Last month, Wiley Online Library posted Religion and Sectarianism in Ulster: Interpreting the Northern Ireland Troubles published in Religion Compass by Laurence Elliot.  The description follows.

The following article considers the various arguments and counter-arguments around the role of religion in causing and sustaining the conflict in Northern Ireland. It identifies the essential elements of the problem and assesses a number of the explanations given, emphasising the difficulty of providing a single answer to such a complex question. The correlation between religion and the divisions in Northern Ireland seems at first sight obvious, but, as a number of commentators have rightly observed, pinning down the relationship between someone’s religion and their attitudes is much more problematic. This essay therefore avoids the reductionism and ‘either/or’ formulations of so many scholars on both sides of the debate, instead emphasising that religion is ultimately one of a number of dimensions to Northern Irish identity, the politics of which sustains the social divisions and was the source of the political violence that ravaged the region.

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Cumper & Lewis (eds.), “Religion, Rights and Secular Society”

This December, Edward Elgar Publishing will publish Religion, Rights and Secular Society: European Perspectives edited by Peter Cumper (University of Leicester, UK) and Tom Lewis (Nottingham Trent University, UK).   The publisher’s description follows.

This topical collection of chapters examines secular society and the legal protection of religion and belief across Europe, both in general and more nation-specific terms.

The expectations of many that religion in modern Europe would be swept away by the powerful current of secularization have not been realised, and today few topics generate more controversy than the complex relationship between religious and secular values. The ‘religious/secular’ relationship is examined in this book, which brings together scholars from different parts of Europe and beyond to provide insights into the methods by which religion and equivalent beliefs have been, and continue to be, protected in the legal systems and constitutions of European nations. The contributors’ chapters reveal that the oft-tumultuous legacy of Europe’s relationship with religion still resonates across a continent where legal, political and social contours have been powerfully shaped by faith and religious difference.

Covering recent controversies such as the Islamic headscarf, and the presence of the crucifix in school class-rooms, this book will appeal to academics and students in law, human rights and the social sciences, as well as law and policy makers and NGOs in the field of human rights.

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Blitt on the United Nations’ Resolutions on Combating Religious Intolerance

Robert C. Blitt (University of Tennessee College of Law) has posted Defamation of Religion: Rumors of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated. The abstract follows.

This Article explores the recent decisions by the United Nations (“UN”) Human Rights Council and General Assembly to adopt consensus resolutions aimed at “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.” These resolutions represent an effort to move past a decade’s worth of contentious roll call votes in favor of prohibiting defamation of religion within the international human rights framework. Although labeled “historic” resolutions, this Article argues that the UN’s new compromise approach endorsed in 2011 — motivated in part by the desire to end years of acrimonious debate over the acceptability of shielding religious beliefs from insult and criticism — is problematic because it risks being exploited to sanction the continued prohibition on defamation of religion and perpetuation of human rights violations on the ground.

After briefly considering the history of defamation of religion at the UN and the strategies employed by its proponents, this Article turns to an assessment of the UN Human Rights Council’s 2011 consensus Resolution 16/18. In light of the resolution’s objectives, this Article explores the viability of the international consensus around “combating intolerance” and tests to what extent, if any, the concept of defamation of religion may be waning in practice. To this end, this Article weighs, among other things, statements and resolutions of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (“OIC”) pertaining to defamation — particularly those issued following the adoption of Resolution 16/18 — as well as its activities in other UN bodies. Read more