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Full-Text Articles in Religion Law
Religious Freedom In Canada: A Crucible For Constitutionalism, Benjamin Berger
Religious Freedom In Canada: A Crucible For Constitutionalism, Benjamin Berger
Articles & Book Chapters
This article examines three axes around which contemporary Canadian debates on freedom of religion are turning: the status and protection of group and collective religious interests; the emergence – and instability – of state neutrality as the governing ideal in the management of religious difference; and the treatment of Indigenous religion. Each is discussed as a key thematic and doctrinal development emerging from recent activity in the freedom of religion jurisprudence in Canada. Each is also an instance, the article suggests, of religion doing its particularly effective work of exposing the fundamental tensions and dynamics in Canadian constitutionalism more generally.
Liberal Constitutionalism And The Unsettling Of The Secular, Benjamin Berger
Liberal Constitutionalism And The Unsettling Of The Secular, Benjamin Berger
Articles & Book Chapters
This chapter argues that certain features of our constitutional theories and practices have been more dependent than we have heretofore acknowledged on an implicit faith in the character and success of secularism. An assumption about the “secular” nature of the social world has lent certain resources to liberal constitutional theory and made possible particular ideas about the nature of contemporary constitutionalism. Yet the conviction that our political and social lives can be satisfyingly described as secular has been seriously destabilized by experience and theory alike. A simple faith in secularism thus unsettled, certain gaps or shortcomings in prevailing accounts of …