In order to avoid both religious intolerance and religious indifference, we need to develop a positive notion of an open laicity or secularity that permits us to respect our religiously plural as well as secular contemporary situation. Open laicity or secularity is the practical and political consequence of a Protestant theology and spirituality. It represents a critical answer to the disaster of secularism and laicism. Most of the difficulties in the discussion between traditionalist Christians (Orthodox, Catholic, or Evangelical!) (...) and modern, critical Christians (Protestant, Catholic, and maybe some Orthodox too!) come from a confusion between the danger of secularism and laicism, that this article criticizes very deeply, and the positive reality of a secular world, grounded in the very biblical and theological understanding of a created world, in which God has given to all human beings the task to behave in a rational, responsible, creative, and respectful way. (shrink)

La definición de la relación entre el Estado y las religiones forma parte del ordenamiento jurídico de los países, indicando si el Estado es laico, o si se le atribuye una religión oficial o, incluso, si es un Estado teocrático. Este artículo se basa en una investigación cualitativa, histórica, bibliográfica y documental. Se busca ofrecer una contribución para una mejor comprensión del tema de la laicidad del Estado. Se centra en el caso de Brasil, específicamente el Acuerdo Brasil-Santa Sede (o (...) Concordata), firmado en noviembre de 2008 en el Vaticano. (shrink)

This article examines the development of the concept of laicity and its specific application within the French political, social and cultural context. In doing so it contends that, far from being a 'French exception' as is sometimes perceived in the media, laicity in France drew on concepts and practices already in place in other countries at the time of the 1905 legislation separating church and state. The article concludes by asserting a distinction between laicity and secularism, whereby (...) the former emphasises the separation of the roles of state and religion within a nation, whereas the latter refers to the progressive loss of relevance of religion within a culture. The specific definition of laicity has been enshrined in a recent International Declaration of Laicity in the 21st Century. (shrink)

A formação do Estado secular brasileiro: notas sobre a relação entre religião, laicidade e esfera pública ( The Formation of Brazilian Secular State: Notes about the relation between religion, laicity and public sphere). RESUMO Este artigo apresenta abordagens teóricas que discutem as categorias descritivas esfera pública e esfera privada, as noções de laico/laicidade, o paradigma da secularização e o secular. Objetivamos contribuir para uma analítica sobre o uso desses termos no tratamento de questões que envolvem a relação entre Estado (...) e religião. Após a delimitação desse quadro teórico pretende-se subsidiar epistemologicamente o debate sobre ensino religioso nas escolas públicas do Estado brasileiro. Considerando a relação com diferentes lugares sociais e tempos históricos, estamos interessados nos sentidos dessas noções produzidos histórica, política e culturalmente. Para além de indicar a incompatibilidade do fato religioso na esfera pública ou apontar sua centralidade para a sociedade, propomos pensar a relação entre Estado e religião na modernidade marcada pela reinvenção de ambas. Nesse sentido, entendemos que o exercício de repensar categorias descritivas e sistemas de classificações seja positivo para a elaboração de um tipo de ensino religioso que contemple a complexidade de nossa realidade social. Palavras-chave : Religião. Estado. Esfera pública/privada. Secularização. Laicidade.This article presents theoretical approaches that discuss the descriptive categories of the public and private spheres, the meaning of the terms laic and laicity, the paradigm of secularization and the meaning of the term secular. This article aims to contribute for an analysis about the use of these terms in the treatment of questions that involve the relation between State and religion. After the delimitation of this theoretical frame, we intend to subsidize epistemologically the debate about religious education in the public schools of Brazilian State. Considering the relation with different places and historical times, we are interested in the meanings of these notions historical, political and culturally produced. Apart of indicate the incompatibility of the religious fact on public sphere or indicate its centrality to society, we propose to discuss the relation between State and religion in the modernity marked by both. In this sense, we understand that the exercise of rethinking descriptive categories and classification systems is positive for the elaboration of one kind of religious education that contemplates the complexity of our social reality. Keywords : Religion. State. public/private Sphere. Secularization. Laicity. (shrink)

In banning religious symbols for civil servants in a position of authority, Québec's laicity law disproportionately burdens religious minorities. Nevertheless, politicians seem to somehow avoid this problem, and the law is largely supported by the population. This insensibility to religious discrimination calls for an explanation. I argue that part of the explanation for this unequal treatment of religion in secular society lies in active religious ignorance. Drawing a parallel from how white ignorance functions to protect racial inequalities, I argue (...) that a kind of active ignorance in the religious domain – that I name post-Christendom ignorance – makes it difficult to comprehend alternative understandings of religious experience and allows the majority to deny its religious positionality. Applying this framework, I criticize Québec's laicity law for wrongfully relying on inadequate hermeneutical resources about religion. Further, the failure to see that targeting only religious symbols worn by individuals is discriminatory is the result of the epistemic vice of closed-mindedness. This article aims to show how religious persons in secular society can suffer hermeneutical wrongs because of their religious identity, and it aims to show that this injustice in the epistemic domain can help explain the unequal treatment of religious minorities while providing grounds for criticism. (shrink)

This article rethinks the future of continental philosophy of religion through a central, annotative reading of Gianni Vattimo’s Not Being God. The reading develops from Agamben on citation and Žižek on the short-circuit into a new reading strategy of annotation as a development of weak thought. It argues for what is termed the flânerie of the weak thought of annotation, rethinking the future of continental philosophy of religion as para-thought. The future envisioned is a future that flâneurs, annotates and is (...) para- to both the religious and laicity and their associated strong claims and metaphysics. For Vattimo, weak thought helps us see that if we read Nietzsche as an announcement and not a claim, hermeneutics teaches us we cannot conceive ultimate objective truths. Therefore, after Heidegger, we reach the end of metaphysics and the age of weak thought, where we respond only to appeals and announcements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE EDUCATOR IN THE FACE OF REFORM Enrique Gómez León It might be claimed that all the reforms ofthe educational systems of the wealthy nations of the West aim to accomplish the motto of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The principle goal of school today is the formation ofcitizens. Laws enshrine this sacred purpose, and politicians repeat it in every conceivable declaration oftheir programs. Public schools are ofcourse (...) part and parcel ofthe State. It is the ideals ofthe State that govern the educational process, and this in a double sense: schools should train pupils in these values, and at the same time reproduce these values in their functional processes. A quick glance at the characteristics of any high school allows us to recognize the values in question: a)Freedom of expression for teachers and pupils; freedom ofprograms, or rather the multiplication of subjects to be taught, since schools should represent every facet of our complex reality; freedom also from etiquette, from formal rules of behavior regarding what to wear, the way to speak up, how to address teachers; freedom, finally, from parents, who abandon to schools the role of primary and fundamental educator. b)Equality, a benefit ofdemocratization, which bears with it the obligation ofschooling for all; boys and girls study the same contents, and there is no exclusion for economic or religious reasons, nor for intellectual ones. c)Fraternity nowadays cashes out as tolerance, a true fetish word in the contemporary world. It is a tolerance which implies an absolute laicity so as to allow the expression ofevery kind ofbelief, or its lack, and which implies the right to speak far beyond what science allows, and yet to fall far short of what it demands, since emotion and sentiment demand their place alongside, or above, truth. The indubitable goodness of these objectives, these ideals—which no one would dare to criticize in public—does not manage to hide a spreading sense ofmalaise: teachers complain that pupils learn less and less, discipline problems increase; adolescents complain that school doesn't frighten them Enrique Gómez León97 any more, it'sjust boring; parents complain that there are no longer any good manners, their children are wasting their time; the newspapers deplore the increase of violence in the schools. Often the motives behind these complaints are quite banal: teachers focus on their own convenience and resist change; comparisons with the past are no longer valuable, since now everybody has become a product of schooling; most adolescents, above all, are extraordinarily entertained by school, where they meet up with their friends; parents forget that they had already scandalized their own parents with their astounding new mores; newspapers are slaves to the moment, obliged every day to forget what happened yesterday. We should not overlook the bad reasons for complaining about the malaise, but we should equally give it its due attention. I would like to bring out some arguments underlying it, as described from the position ofa teacher ofadolescents who loves and enjoys his profession. This malaise does not spring from resistance to the ideals of our era—liberty, equality, fraternity—but from the experience of a surprising fact: the more one exalts that slogan, the more the intellectual task of the school recedes into the background. As a consequence, freedom is reduced to lack of direction, equality to simple indifference, and fraternity to a paralyzing absence ofany meaningful boundaries. School, then—we are still talking about the state education system—may tend to produce what it is trying to avoid: a society both less free and more unequal. It is the apprehension of this future that provokes some disquieting questions among teachers: What use is this? What am I doing? What might I be able to do? In other words: What power do I have? So as to bring out some elements for discussion, and with the goal also of justifying the preceding hypothesis, I am going to approach the problem by first drawing away from it. In this way I hope to gather the necessary "élan" to underline two points—among many others—which, in my opinion, deserve more thought. Mircea Eliade repeats on several occasion this... (shrink)

The concept of sovereignty and laicism still being instrumented into different projection to that’s which have been conceived and used for through the french revolution and the old regime. This article is not to discuss that, but to delight how another concept deduced from it becomes antagonistic with it in the French context. Laicity referred to the French V constitution, or the act of 1905, it’s not what it appear, and mostly known in the french literature, this article is (...) to reject all that, and go toward an etymological construction of the concept into the french politics since XV century. Then to examination who and how the old regime, and the XIX century have been involved with the religious beliefs then to answer the questions: does the revolution have been laic or atheist? The answer is useful to go forward the examination of the french act of the separation of the State from the churches of 1905, and to determine if that act has been laic or atheist. The questions of how the idea of laicism has been reversed into the interwar period thus to the 1958 constitution to be developed in a further work, but the conclusion proposed here is the evidence of constitutional inter-contradiction and reversed usage of the concept which is being instrumented today further then a constitutional idolatry, but a constitutional nihilism. (shrink)

This introduction supplies further bearing points for the conceptual map, which the introduction to the previous issue on European bioethics (2008/1) had provided for sorting out the various dimension in which the essays collected in these issues resemble and differ from each other. Special attention is devoted to communication, as diverse Christianities attend to different purposes, problems, and opportunities for normatively engaging (persuading, influencing, ruling, opposing, and converting) their surrounding secularized cultures. These differences reflect incompatible ways of conceiving Christ's acts (...) of healing, as these provide a model for His disciples' bioethics. These differences also reflect diversely rationalist and noetic epistemologies. The subtext concerns the haunting question about the enduring sustainability of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe. As Schotsmans opts for a Roman Catholicism that is not recognized as such by his Magisterium, as Muller transforms Protestantism into a religiously nonhostile laicity, as Messer and Silva da Barbosa hope for the prophetic impact of communal “cities on the hill,” and as the Orthodox pursue the conversion of Western Europe in Greek, Russian, and Rumanian, ongoing Divine miracles present the most realistic hope. (shrink)

How is religion experienced in public institutions? In schools is there respect for the various religions or do teachers legitimize their own beliefs? To understand these issues we participated in religious education classes, we interviewed teachers and servants of the city hall and city hall. From the results we can point out: The symbols and religious practices are present in public spaces, where one should excel in the principle of laicity; in the Teaching of Religion, in general, prevails to (...) the religion of the teacher; the other are seen as beliefs; the child who is opposed to the teacher’s attitude ends up being discriminated against and excluded. Keywords: Beliefs. Teaching of Religion. Public Spaces. Laicity. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a critique of the normative foundations of the 2019 Quebec Act respecting the laicity of the State. This is primarily based on the theses we developed in La nation pluraliste. Repenser la diversité religieuse au Québec (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018), and elaborates a suitable diversity management model for Quebec using the republican liberalism described in Rawls’ later work. This discussion draws attention to certain pitfalls in the concept (...) of secularism as defended by the Coalition Avenir Québec government. Second, we present a methodological discussion on how political philosophy can contribute to the formation of law, by examining how our criticism of Act respecting the laicity of the State corresponds to an exercise in implementing Rawls’ own method of thoughtful balance. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] starting point of the book is the assessment of discrimination against Muslim immigrants in French society. The first part presents the results from several surveys that illustrate the negative opinions as well as the discriminatory practices against Muslim immigrants. The second part reviews the characteristics of Muslim immigrants that fuel the discrimination and negative opinions, mainly (...) their religious practices, their gender relations, and their poor competence with the French language.Although this kind of investigation is needed, it rests on two main ideological assumptions that severely weaken its relevance. First, why do the authors claim an investigation into Christian-heritage countries, when the focus is on France? The particularity of French laicity... (shrink)