Call for papers: Church, State, and the Life of Faith


Anselm-institute

April 10-12, 2014

Saint Anselm College
Manchester, NH

The issue of the relationship between the Church and the political order has been of perennial interest to Catholic thinkers. Saint Augustine famously spoke of the City of God and the City of Man, and in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries Saint Anselm fought for the institutional independence of the Church in Normandy and England. It remains an issue of great historical, cultural, educational, political and moral significance. The conference looks to explore the issue both historically and systematically. Thus, we encourage papers on Saint Anselm, his sources and intellectual descendants, but also on the fundamental questions of how Church and state, religion and culture, and most broadly faith and reason are related.

Please send on abstract of 100-200 words to mbrown@anselm.edu by December 1, 2013. Proposals for panels with up to three papers are also welcome. The Saint Anselm Lecture by Prof. Robert George, Princeton University, will be on Thursday evening. Panel sessions will be on Friday and Saturday.

Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification, by Andrew F. March

Abstract

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called “religious reasons” ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation.

Giving Up On the Founding: The Separation of Church and State and the Writing of Establishment Clause History – Section Journal Article

by Christopher S. Grenda, Bronx Community College of the City University of New York

Abstract

Examination of the First Amendment's establishment clause in the post World War II period is unique in American constitutional interpretation because virtually all voices had agreed on one point, originalism. Few if any significant writers on the establishment clause had doubted the centrality of the founders' original intent for interpreting the clause's meaning. Yet this now has changed. Unlike their predecessors, leading advocates of church-state separation have now moved away from an original meaning interpretation of the establishment clause. Yet these separationists continue to try to ground their normative policy prescriptions in establishment clause mandates. They attempt this balancing act by employing narrative strategies of evolutionary processes in history. They do not simply track changes in constitutional doctrine, but characterize changes yielding greater separation between church and state through the nation's history as incipient in the Republic's founding, an originally inchoate church-state principle only fully formed through historical evolution. In the process, they sweep myriad separationist ideas into their progressively evolving narratives which have never been enunciated as law. Their accounts thus often reflect less an attempt to track historical developments in fundamental law than an attempt to construct fundamental law narratives. These attempts highlight persistent historical problems in the separationist endeavor that require attention if the evolutionary narratives of leading separationist are to shape the field of establishment clause history.

Journal link.

Aaron Wildavsky Award – Deadline Extended

Dear colleagues,

A gentle reminder to send us your best dissertations for consideration for APSA's Aaron Wildavsky Award, that recognizes the best dissertation on religion and politics successfully defended within the last two years (2011/2012). Please send submissions by June 10 2013 (pdf copy of the dissertation itself) to the chair of the Wildavsky committee, Sultan Tepe, at: sultant@uic.edu. 

Best regards,

Iza Hussin
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago
Chair, Religion and Politics Section, APSA

The Politics of New Atheism – Section Journal Article

Abstract: This article discusses the political implications of the new atheism movement that has been popularized by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. New atheism is largely defined by its political goals, yet it has received relatively little attention from political theorists. To the extent that scholars have commented on new atheists' political thought, they have generally misinterpreted it and presented it as being intolerant. This article will argue that new atheists' attack on religion is largely motivated by their desire to defend a liberal view of politics and liberal values.