Departments

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secularism

  • SOURCE: The Hill
    6/8/2023

    Is Oklahoma's Religious Charter School Good News for Secularists?

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    Oklahoma recently approved the first publicly-funded religious charter school in the United States. Is it possible that this ambitious move will backfire when schools representing all denominations and faiths demand equal treatment? 

  • SOURCE: MSNBC
    3/3/2023

    Why Are Dems Surprised at Eric Adams's Rant Against Church-State Separation?

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    Democrats and secularists shocked by the New York mayor's declaration of religion as the heart of society need to confront facts: the church-state separation they revere has been all but entirely demolished. Secularists must now demand equal footing for their lack of belief.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    8/28/2022

    Alito's Battle Against Secular Society is Just Getting Started

    "Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category."

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    7/15/2022

    Review: David Sehat on the Struggle to Make a Secular America

    by Johann N. Neem

    In "This Earthly Frame," Sehat examines the way that activists in the 20th Century pushed the nation from an implicit privileging of Protestant Christianity toward a posture of "negative secularism" that separated the functions of government from doctrinal belief, and the transience of that victory. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Globe
    8/1/2022

    The Demise of the Church-State Wall

    by Steven V. Mazie

    A political scientist and court correspondent says that SCOTUS has adopted a radical version of the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment that makes a mockery of the historic separation of religious and political authority. 

  • SOURCE: Freethinker
    6/14/2022

    Is the Right Now Post-Religious? If Only!

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    A high-profile op-ed by Nate Hochman obfuscates the continued significance of strains of Christian nationalism to the rising far right and falsely claims this movement is a secular one. 

  • SOURCE: Salon
    5/14/2022

    We're Facing the Results of the Dems' Retreat from Secularism

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    By trying to match the Republicans on bringing Christian faith into policy, Democrats abandoned the difficult but necessary struggles to define how a diverse society protects religious freedom for majority and minority faiths – and those of no faith. 

  • SOURCE: Current
    3/11/2022

    John Fea Interviews David Sehat on American Secularism

    "American secularism was the result of a layered religious conflict in the 20th century that played out in the courts and that left the U.S. Supreme Court with no option but the adoption of a secular order as a condition of social peace and political equality."

  • SOURCE: Salon
    1/7/2022

    Secularism: The Essential, Fatally Weak Guardrail of Democracy

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    The framers of the US Constitiution failed to build in the protections against religious belief overpowering the rights of others or the security of the state that Locke and other political theorists thought were urgently necessary. This oversight might imperil democracy.

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    11/3/2021

    After Paine, Why Did American Secularism Fail?

    by Chris Lehmann

    Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt chronicles the decline of American secularism; the fate of Thomas Paine's looted corpse stands as a tidy metaphor for the mismatch of secular rationality with the desire for communal ritual. 

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    12/4/2020

    French Academics Fear Becoming Scapegoats in War on Terrorism

    The killing of a social studies teacher has opened French academics to accusations of supporting radical Islamists and undermining France's policy of national secularism; those who turn a critical lens to French colonialism and racism in contemporary France have received sharp criticism from nationalist and center-right politicians.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/26/2020

    A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration

    The murder of a French social studies teacher who showed his multiethnic class images offensive to Islam illustrates the dilemma of the French policy of secularism, which is beset on one side by complaints that immigrants do not assimilate and on the other by rising xenophobia and racism.