February 24, 2014

“Power, Politics, and the Promotion of Religious Freedom”

Prof. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Northwestern University)

12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp, Event Code: LRST7

The promotion of religious freedom is ubiquitous.  An impressive array of states and international authorities has taken up the cause of promoting religious freedom globally. The Canadian government is a recent example.  This talk steps back from the excitement surrounding religious freedom advocacy to examine the power of religious freedom and the politics of governing social difference through religious rights.

Religious freedom advocacy singles out groups for legal protection as religious groups; molds religions into discrete “faith communities” with clean boundaries, clearly defined orthodoxies, and senior leaders who speak on their behalf; and privileges a modern liberal understanding of faith.  This has important implications for the politics of religious diversity, and particularly for dissidents, doubters, and those who identify with nonorthodox versions of protected traditions.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.  She teaches and writes on the politics of religious diversity, secularism and governance, the intersection of law and religion, the politics of human rights, the history and politics of US foreign relations, and the international relations of the Middle East including Turkey and Iran.  Professor Shakman Hurd is the author of the award-winning volume The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, 2008), and co-edited Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (Palgrave, 2010).

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March 8, 2013

“Religious Equality in a Partial World”

Professor Larry Sager (University of Texas)

12:30pm – 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp, Event Code: LRST6

In our joint work, Chris Eisgruber and I have argued that a robust equality principle underwrites religious liberty in the United States.  The touchstone is equal membership, which, in the name of justice, requires that a political community accord equal status to all persons, without regard to their race, ethnicity, religion or other fundamental aspects of their identities.  In a liberal pluralist state like the United States, equal membership promotes a ruthless demand for equal treatment along the fault line of religious belief.  But when we raise our gaze to the rest of the world, partiality is everywhere.  Is it possible that in other regime types some forms of partiality can be tolerated? To grasp the nettle, consider Israel, which is committed by its founding documents to be both a “Jewish state” and a state that “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…”.  Could a state satisfy both of these aspirations?

Larry Sager is the Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Regents Chair in the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin.  One of the United States’ pre-eminent constitutional theorists, Professor Sager is author of Justice in Plainclothes: a Theory of American Constitutional Practice (Yale 2004), and Religious Freedom and the Constitution (co-authored with Christopher Eisgruber) (Harvard 2007).

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February 4, 2013

“Regulating Intimacy: Religion, Sex, and Secular Cunning”

Professor Mayanthi Fernando (UC, Santa Cruz)

12:30pm – 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp, Event Code: LRST5

How does the public/private distinction so central to secular-liberal democracy inflect the secular state’s regulation of sex and religion? Focussing on contemporary France, this talk analyzes how political and legal practices aimed at securing secularity by rendering both sex and religion private paradoxically compel Muslim women to reveal in public the innermost details of their sexual and religious lives. That dual incitement to hide and to exhibit, and the grim consequences of exhibiting that which must be hidden, constitute “the cunning of secular power.”

Mayanthi Fernando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California (Santa Cruz). Her research examines the political, religious, and legal practices that are generated in the contemporary encounter of Islam and French secularism.  Professor Fernando is currently working on a book manuscript entitled On the Muslim Question: Islam, Secularism, and the Future of France, to be published with Duke University Press.

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November 26, 2012

“Putting Faith In Hate: Religion As The Source And Subject Of Hate Speech”

Professor Richard Moon (University of Windsor)

12:30pm – 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp, Event Code: LRST4

Many recent hate speech cases involve religion either as the source of views that are alleged to be hateful or as the subject of such views.  The particular difficulty of these cases can be traced to a crucial ambivalence in our conception of religious adherence: is religious commitment a personal judgment that is, in theory, revisable, or is it a central element of an individual’s identity?  Hate speech regulation depends on the distinction between attacks on an individual or group and attacks on an individual or group’s beliefs, which must be open to (even harsh and intemperate) debate.  Yet our complex conception of religious adherence complicates this distinction in a variety of ways.

Richard Moon is a Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Windsor.  He is the author of The Constitutional Protection of Freedom of Expression (Toronto 2000) and editor of Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (UBC 2008).

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September 24, 2012

“The Legal Person After the Sexual Revolution: Criminal Law, the Church and the Family”

Prof. Ngaire Naffine (University of Adelaide)

12:30pm to 2:00pm, Room 2027, Osgoode Hall Law School

RSVP Required: www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp, Event Code: LRST3

Criminal Law, the Family and the Church have worked together as a mutually reinforcing economy, keeping the married woman in her place. All three institutions have prescribed rules for intimate married life, conferring authority on the husband, never the wife. But times are changing. The traditional marital rights of men have been formally curtailed, husbands can be charged with the rape of their wives and the married woman now has at least formal powers to refuse sexual access. The family has loosened its form and the power of the Church over intimate sexual matters has diminished. This paper considers the effects of this modernisaton of the lives of married women and men on the character of the criminal legal person. Are they his undoing?

Ngaire Naffine is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Adelaide. An innovative contributor to debates in jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, criminology, criminal law, and medical law, Professor Naffine is the author of Law’s Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal Person (Hart 2009).

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March 19, 2012

“The Power of Pluralist Thinking: Why the Idea of Religious Freedom Persists”

Professor Courtney Bender (Columbia)

Tracing recent shifts in our vision of religious pluralism’s value for democracy, this talk raises questions about the ground on which we imagine our political and religious present. Specifically, it asks how pluralism has come to be a robust sociological indication of religious freedom and, in the process, how it has become linked in new (and some surprisingly old) ways to claims for political freedom in democratic societies.

Courtney Bender is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Columbia University. One of the leading voices in the sociology and study of religion in the U.S., she is the author of The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago 2010) and co-editor of What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age (Columbia 2012).

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 February 13, 2012

“Here Comes Everyone: Political Religion in the 21st Century”

Winnifred Sullivan is the Director of the Law and Religion Program at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Author of The Impossibility Of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005) and Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform And The Constitution (Princeton 2009).

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