Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs

October 9, 2013

Freedom to Flourish: Can Religious Liberty Contribute to Justice, Human Dignity, and the Success of Societies Everywhere?

RFP will hold a conference on October 9-10, 2013 at Georgetown on the relationship between religious freedom and human flourishing. This conference will serve as the capstone of our current three-year program of interdisciplinary research and public engagement, and will feature top experts from diverse fields exploring the proposition that religious freedom is not only a universal right but a universal good—a key ingredient in the flourishing of societies everywhere. The first day of the conference, which will be keynoted by philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, will explore how religious...

May 31, 2013

The Good Muslim and Religious Freedom

The complexities and challenges of religious freedom in contemporary Islam find many of their roots in the development of Islamic law and theology during the Middle Ages, a fact largely unknown to the general public. In a new book, The Good Muslim: Reflections on Classical Islamic Law and Theology, Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh and associate scholar at the Religious Freedom Project, attempts to fill this void. The book explores a wide range of topics from divorce, slavery, and perspectives on evil, to virtue and friendship...

May 30, 2013

Threats to Religious Freedom in the U.S. and Europe: Concerns of Majority and Minority Communities

The 2013 National Religious Freedom Conference, sponsored by the American Religious Freedom Program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, brought faith community leaders, religious freedom policy experts, and elected officials together in an effort to promote and defend religious freedom in the U.S. As part of this conference, RFP organized a panel entitled "Threats to Religious Freedom in the U.S. and Europe: Concerns of Majority and Minority Communities", which addressed increasing restrictions on religious freedom in the U.S. and the troubling possible future trajectory Europe...

May 17, 2013

Markets, Justice, and the Law

Two symposia, the first in Chicago on May 17 and the second at Georgetown on May 31, brought together ethicists, lawyers, and economists to examine how moral critiques of the economic order might be better positioned to steer market practices and legal regulation of markets.

Questions addressed include: What does the gap between judging morally and actually transforming the economic order mean for implementing justice within society? How can critical judgments be brought to bear in increasingly complex, bureaucratic, and market driven policy debates about how law regulates markets? What is...

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April 26, 2013

Beyond Church and State

In his new book, Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion (Cambridge, 2013), Matthew Scherer moves beyond common understandings of secularism as the separation of church and state toward a concept of a constant transformation of religious and political life, akin to a process of conversion. Transposing the idea of conversion from religious history to contemporary politics brings the limitations of the modern categories of “religion” and “politics” into relief, and shows how re-framing secularism is itself an essential issue within contemporary global politics. Beyond...

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