Suchergebnisse

How can religion contribute to democracy in a secular age? What can the millennia-old Catholic tradition say to Church-state controversies in the United States and globally? This volume, sponsored by the inter-disciplinary Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, is a dialogue between Douglas W. Kmiec, a leading scholar of American constitutional law and Catholic legal thought, and experts from a range of fields and countries

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AbstractThis article deals with one of the perennial questions of legal and political philosophy, i. e., how the state should relate to religion? It makes a distinction between five models: (i) the atheist state, (ii) the theocratic state, (iii) the model of an official state church, (iv) the multiculturalist state, and (v) the agnostic state (or secular state). The authors reflect on the legitimacy of each of these models. Some states reclaim their right to adopt an official religion as their state religion or as the religious Leitkultur of their country (model iii). Others favor the support of religion as long as this is premised on the equal rights of all religions (model iv). And others think that the state can only support equal citizenship if the state does not support any religion whatsoever (model v).

Abstract
This article deals with one of the perennial questions of legal and political philosophy, ie, how the state should relate to religion? It makes a distinction between five models: (i) the atheist state, (ii) the theocratic state, (iii) the model of an official state church, (iv) the multiculturalist state, and (v) the agnostic state (or secular state). The authors reflect on the legitimacy of each of these models. Some states reclaim their right to adopt an official religion as their state religion or as the religious Leitkultur of their country (model iii). Others favor the support of religion as long as this is premised on the equal rights of all religions (model iv). And others think that the state can only support equal citizenship if the state does not support any religion whatsoever (model v).

In response to rising immigration flows and the fear of Islamic radicalization, several Western countries have enacted policies to restrict religious expression and emphasize secularism and Western values. Despite intense public debate, there is little systematic evidence on how such policies influence the behavior of the religious minorities they target. In this paper, we use rich quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the effects of the 2004 French headscarf ban on the socioeconomic integration of French Muslim women. We find that the law reduces the secondary educational attainment of Muslim girls and affects their trajectory in the labor market and family composition in the long run. We provide evidence that the ban operates through increased perceptions of discrimination and that it strengthens both national and religious identities.

AbstractIn late 2012 the first civil marriage in Lebanon and, at the end of the following year, the first Lebanese baby to be not registered as belonging to a community, were officially recognized months after administrative delay and legal argumentation. These recognitions unsettled the Lebanese consensus that all citizens belonged to one of the communities of Muslims, Christians, or Jews that, moreover, had long held exclusive jurisdiction over the marriages of their members. A space seemed to have opened up in which a secular alternative could be pursued in the conduct of matters of state and personal life. Based on an analysis of the constitutive processes of this recognition, I trace the lineaments of a distinctively Lebanese secularism, which, I argue, consists of the assumption that marriage and identity are joined together in a mutually dependent relationship. I show that although the recognition of civil marriage and non‐belonging may seem to drive a wedge between marriage and identity, they are in fact a different way of rearticulating this assumption and the attitudes, norms, and practices that sustain it. Far from securing their stable separation, the recognition shifts their point of tension from the community to the individual, and from legal to administrative power.

A three war culture war pits fundamentalist secularism against religions, christianity against a suspicious secularism, and Islam against secularism