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Call for Abstracts für den Auftaktworkshop des Arbeitskreises Säkulare Weltanschauungen vom 8. bis 9. Dezember 2023 in Leipzig. Deadline: 15. Oktober 2023

Call for Papers für eine Tagung vom 24. bis 25. Oktober 2024 in Berlin. Deadline: 15. Januar 2024

A pattern over time

Müssen sich Religion und Feminismus ausschließen? Das Beispiel buddhistischer Mädchenschulen auf Sri Lanka zeigt, dass diese Trennung eine Geschichte des Feminismus verschleiert, deren Erinnerung...

Call for Papers für Kolloquium vom 22. bis 24. Februar 2024 in Berlin. Deadline: 8. Dezember 2023

"Wir als Tansanier/Afrikaner haben unsere eigenen Werte und Kulturen, die sich im Laufe von Jahren gebildet haben, die unsere Lebensweise bestimmt haben und die nur Ehen zwischen Mann und Frau...

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Iza Hussin and Paul Seabright about recent trends in world religions, the interplay between politics and religion, and the economics of religion.
The post What is the future of religion? appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

For decades, social scientific study of religion has been dominated by the secularisation question: is religion growing or declining? But this has distracted us from asking how religion itself is changing and, in turn, changing understandings of identity, political participation and citizenship for millions of people around the world. Ahead of our upcoming #LSEFestival panel … Continued

Am 20. Juni 2024 findet an der Universität Münster ein Workshop zum Thema "Religion and Democratic Theory: Which Institutions for Legitimate Decisions on Religion?" statt. Dabei geht es um die Frage, wie religionspolitische Entscheidungen etwa über religiöse Symbole in der Öffentlichkeit oder Religionsunterricht getroffen werden sollten und welche Institutionen dafür geeignet sind. Der Workshop verbindet […]

Wie es scheint, geht es derzeit an vielen Stellen in Deutschland um die Verteidigung des christlichen Abendlandes. So prangern Rechtspopulist*innen auf der Straße oder in den Parlamenten eine (kulturelle) Überfremdung an, die besonders die christlichen Wurzeln der nationalen Kultur beschädigen soll. Diese "Gefährdungswahrnehmung" manifestierte sich maßgeblich durch die 2015 rasant gesteigerte Zuwanderung und Migrationsbewegungen nach Europa. Und viele Bürger*innen scheinen diesen Argumenten zu folgen. Doch welche Rolle spielt Religion in diesen Diskussionen? ...

Call for Abstracts für eine Tagung vom 28. bis 29. September 2023 in Schwerte. Deadline: 9. Juni 2023

With a date set for the UK’s next General Election, Paul Bickley asks whether the 'religious vote' matters. This is the fourth General Election in nine years, though at least this Parliament has nearly lasted its full duration (albeit with three Prime Ministers). Reminds me of good old Brenda from Bristol: "You're joking. Not another … Continued

Walter Olson


The result of today's Supreme Court opinion in Groff v. DeJoy is to load private, not just public, employers with new practical burdens in the name of accommodating employees' religious beliefs. The Court does so by nimbly reinterpreting, as opposed to overturning, the longstanding standard set forth in TWA v. Hardison (1977), which interpreted Title VII as requiring accommodation of this sort by employers only when the costs were "de minimis." Whatever the standard appropriate for government workplaces, there are high stakes in imposing a standard on private workplaces. Today's decision leaves private employment relations in America less free.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in a concurrence joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congress has consistently passed up the opportunity to adopt a standard more burdensome to employers than Hardison, even though it has not hesitated to revisit and correct many other high court decisions on Title VII workplace discrimination that it saw as mistaken. We may hope that the Court's newly announced standard, which shifts focus from the question of whether burdens are "de minimis" to that of whether they are "substantial," will in practice not amount to a drastic change.
Sotomayor makes a further point worth noting in her concurrence. It has been known to happen that a private employer's compelled acceptance of religious accommodation requests will adversely affect the interests of co‐​workers. While Title VII will not allow these interests to enter into the balance when based on mere animus or prejudice toward a religion, it is legitimate for an employer to weigh other sorts of harm to co‐​workers when they work to impair the management of the workplace. If a workplace divided by differential treatment based on religion or any other identity is a less efficient and unified workplace, it will often be legitimate for employers to say no to that differential treatment.