Religious toleration and the limits of liberal secularism: The case of India

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a resurgence of public discourse about the role of tolerance as one of the key elements of the Western philosophical heritage. The fact that Western societies remain largely oblivious to the importance and benefits of diversity points to the pitfalls of the liberal model of religious toleration. Jakob De Roover’s monograph ‘Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism’ offers a new analysis of the deficiencies of secularism and demonstrates why its application to other societies, such as India, is a problematic enterprise. This article argues that Comparative Political Theory has the potential to help forge new conceptual categories and analytical tools that can be utilized to explore diverse modes of tackling religious diversity and fostering tolerance.     

The hard way

In order to model civility, progressive Christians must go against the grain and take “the hard way.”     

Islam,the Divine Command Theory,and Religious Fundamentalism

ABSTRACT

In 1980, George F. Hourani and, more recently in 2010, Mariam al-Attar argued that Islam is not compatible with divine command theory. They rehearsed some standard objections (namely the objectivity of morality, divine goodness, moral knowledge) targeted against meta-ethical divine command theory taking the Qur’an into consideration, and argued that it should be discarded from an Islamic point of view. In addition, they criticized divine command theory since it involves obedience to God and, therefore, does not allow moral reasoning but rather is the source of religious fundamentalism and violence. Although these objections are powerful when applied to the early Ash?arite version of divine command theory, they are not powerful against recent formulations of it presented by Christian philosophers. For example, a divine command theory like that of Robert Merrihew Adams is well suited to respond to these objections. Thus, divine command theory, in its recent formulations, is a genuine option for Muslims and should be given due consideration.     

A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

Governing Islam in French cities: defining ‘acceptable’ public religiosity through municipal consultative bodies

ABSTRACT

In recent years, European states have institutionalised relations with Islamic groups in the form of national Islam councils. Similarly, municipalities have set up more or less comparable bodies to address issues related to urban religious diversity. However, rather than being restricted to Muslim representatives, municipal consultative bodies usually incorporate a variety of religious actors. This contribution analyses three such bodies in the French cities of Rennes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. Adopting a governance perspective and drawing on qualitative fieldwork, I argue that by providing concrete advice on how to address religious issues, these bodies define what are considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ public religious expressions, ultimately influencing normative ideas about laïcité. Moreover, I argue that the history of relationships between religious and municipal authorities and the political culture of the cities, among other factors, shape these local processes, thereby emphasising the distinct role of cities and urban actors in governing religion.     

Comparative Religious Ethics and the Politics of Christian Identity

I present a brief historical narrative of the legacy of Christian ethics in comparative religious ethics (CRE) that attempts to make sense of the tensions within the field from the perspective of the politics of identity with reference to its changing content and practices—its internal history—and what might be called the background conditions—its external history—that shaped not only the content and methods of CRE but also its self‐understanding. Given the politics of Christian identity and the historical development of religious ethics within the American academy, I recommend that scholars of CRE adopt a more confessional mode of inquiry that makes explicit their ultimate commitments.     

Contract governance of religious diversity in a German city-state and its ambivalences

ABSTRACT

This contribution discusses whether specific German policy instruments developed to govern relations between the state and religious communities are a decisive step towards legal equality or of limited impact when extended to non-Christian religious minorities. I research the effects of the 2012 ‘contracts’ concluded between the city’s government and the Muslim and Alevi communities in the German city (state) of Hamburg by drawing on academic research, analysing official documents and interviewing city officials and local politicians. I find that the contracts are a decisive step towards legal equality but bring with them shortcomings that show the limited impact of contract governance measured against the complex reality of (non-)religious life in contemporary societies.     

Secularism and securitisation: the imaginary threat of religious minorities in Canadian public spaces

ABSTRACT

From the assumed physical threat of a ceremonial Kirpan in an elementary school carried by a Sikh child, to the fictional possibility of rich, Arab, Muslim University students utilising their implicitly understood patriarchal power to subjugate all women from access to common swimming pools, Canada has become increasingly replete with examples of using religious minorities as a danger to secure public spaces for societies most privileged. Since 9/11, this has become a far too common public discourse on maintaining close surveillance, scrutiny and regulations for those religious and racialised Canadian minorities associated with the ‘war on terror’. Promoting public spaces, especially public-school spaces, as ‘secular’ has become the argument of supposed non-bias in ensuring safety and equality for the wider population, all the while leaving many of those used as an example of threat to wonder if the ultimate intent is to preserve white, Christian (and Christian cultural) privilege. This article proposes to examine cases since 9/11 that have problematised racialised groups associated with the terrorism in public schooling to the benefit of maintaining ‘Old Stock’ status quo.     

50 years on: the Shap working party on world religions in education and its publications

The Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education celebrates its 50th anniversary in April 2019. In marking this event, the present article offers a summary of the history of the Shap Working Party in relation to its publications. The overview includes material published by the Shap Working Party itself and material published by members of the Shap Working Party which reflects Shap’s general approach and values. Many Shap publications and articles about Shap are available with open access, on the Shap website – http://www.shapworkingparty.org.uk/ – and more will appear in celebration of the Working Party’s 50th Anniversary. The present article is dedicated to the memory of Professor John Hinnells who had a key role in establishing the Shap Working Party and who died in 2018.     

Judaism and the Contingency of Religious Law in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

For Kant’s moral universalism, contingent religious law is legitimate only when it serves as a means of fulfilling the moral law. Though Kant uses traditional theological resources to account for the possibility of “statutory ecclesiastical law” in historical religions, he denies this possibility to Jewish law. Something like Kant’s logic appears in the work of some of his intellectual successors who continue to define Christianity in terms of its moral superiority to Judaism while attempting to excise remaining “Jewish” elements from it. A more adequate account of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity exposes deficiencies in Kant’s universalizing logic which seems to deny any intrinsic value to historical religions. A possible alternative may lie in a modified account of the relationship between the moral law and religious law, perhaps nourished by Jewish thought, including the rabbinic tradition of the Noachide commandments.