Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority

Benjamin L Berger, Richard Moon, Benjamin L Berger, Richard Moon

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509924738
• eBook ISBN: 9781509906475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

In the burgeoning literature on law and religion, scholarly attention has tended to focus on broad questions concerning the scope of religious freedom, the nature of toleration and the meaning of secularism. An under-examined issue is how religion figures in the decisions, actions and experiences of those charged with performing public duties. This point of contact between religion and public authority has generated a range of legal and political controversies around issues such as the wearing of religious symbols by public officials, prayer at municipal government meetings, religious education and conscientious objection by public servants. Authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, the chapters in this volume provide insight into these and other issues. Yet the volume also provides an entry point into a deeper examination of the concepts that are often used to organise and manage religious diversity, notably state neutrality. By examining the exercise of public authority by individuals who are religiously committed – or who, in the discharge of their public responsibilities, must account for those who are – this volume exposes the assumptions about legal and political life that underlie the concept of state neutrality and reveals its limits as a governing ideal.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Religious Neutrality and the Exercise of Public Authority
• 1. The Meaning and Entailment of the Religious Neutrality of the State: The Case of Public Employees
• 2. Against Circumspection: Judges, Religious Symbols, and Signs of Moral Independence
• 3. Religious Lawyering and Legal Ethics
• 4. Managing and Imagining Religion in Canada from the Top and the Bottom: 15 Years After
• 5. God Keep Our Land: The Legal Ritual of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, 1913–16
• 6. In/Visible Religion in Public Institutions: Canadian Muslim Public Servants
• 7. The Prayer Case Saga in Canada: An ‘Expert Insider’ Perspective on Praying in the Political and Public Arenas
• 8. Physicians’ Rights to Conscientious Objection
• 9. Conscientious Objections by Civil Servants: The Case of Marriage Commissioners and Same-Sex Civil Marriages
• 10. A Freedom of Religion-Based Argument for the Regulation of Religious Schools
• 11. ‘Open House’/‘Portes Ouvertes’: Classrooms as Sites of Interfaith Interface
• Index
• Copyright Page