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The Place of Religion in Constitutional Goods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2015
Extract
This paper is about the place of religion in Alan Brudner’s Constitutional Goods. More generally, it offers some thoughts on the place of religion in constitutional theory and political philosophy today. This theologico-political question was central for many centuries, but gradually faded as our secular age affirmed itself. Recent political and social events at the European and at the global level have firmly turned the tide.
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- Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2009
References
1. In Europe, Jürgen Habermas devoted a considerable amount of time to the issue. See, for example, Habermas, Jürgen, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (London: Polity Press, 2008).Google Scholar In the U.S., John Rawls was the first to raise new questions concerning the place of religion in the society in his “public Reason Revisited“, infra note 19. Recently Taylor, Charles contributed to the debate with A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar and so did Lilla, Mark with Stillborn God (London: Knopf, 2007).Google Scholar See also Nussbaum, Martha C., Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008).Google Scholar To that one must add the huge literature on the place of Shar’ia Law in Western and Islamic countries.
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3. Brudner discusses the specific meaning of non-establishment, which he declines in the anti-theocratic principle, the anti-coercion principle, and the anti-preferential treatment principle. He then asks whether non-establishment entails a neutrality principle between belief and non-belief; see Brudner, Alan, Constitutional Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) at 82–88.Google Scholar [Page numbers hereafter are found in the text.]
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