"Reestablishing Religion" Religion, Authoritarianism, & Public Narratives -US, Part 4

"Reestablishing Religion" by Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe.
University of Chicago Law Review January, 2025, 92:1, 1-84
Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives, Part 4
TBA - August - Online
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In the last few years, a new pattern has emerged in the doctrine of religious freedom. Religion must be treated equally with respect to public funding and other forms of government support. But with respect to burdensome government regulations, believers are entitled to special treatment in the form of exemptions or accommodations. When these two lines of doctrine are brought together, they create a legal structure in which the state is required to give religious entities preferential treatment as compared to secular counterparts. So far, this emergent regime of structural preferentialism has favored mostly mainstream religious groups, which demand public funding while opposing a range of government regulations, including antidiscrimination and employment laws, education requirements, and public health rules. Reduced to a slogan, this is a constitutional doctrine of equal funding without equal regulation.

Schragger, Shwartzman, & Tebbe p. 3 Reestablishing Religion
SORAAAD's Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives series part 4 will be rescheduled for August to allow Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe to join us for a conversation regarding their article "Reestabling Religion" and the last cases of the current session of the Supreme Court of the United States.

After discussing the article and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent pattern of decisions and addressing questions raised by those attending; we will take up the current state of teaching law and religion, and  the potential extensibility of "structural preferentialism" an analytical concept as a means of assessment and comparison among societies where majority religions function within legal systems that assert some form of secularism or small "l" liberal democracy.
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Suggested Reading
Reestablishing Religion is available for download
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SORAAAD is sponsored by Department of Gender, Religion, and Critical Studies, University of Regina and the Edward Bailey Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion.
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Calendar

April 13, 2025
SORAAAD Book Club: Composing Violence, Religion, Authoritarianism and Public Narratives, Part 3
May 16-19, 2025
The 47th Implicit Religion Conference: Religion, Race and Sexuality
May 30, 2025
Implicit Religion US Conference: Extensive Effects, featuring a SORAAAD Workshop for students.
August 2025
Date TBA
"Reestablishing Religion" Religion, Authoritarianism and Public Narratives - US, Part 4

Representation and the Analytical Study of Religion

SORAAAD’s 10th year of workshops, with the theme, "Representation and the Analytical Study of Religion" was interrupted by the COVID surge of early 2021, after talks by Richard Newton and Alana Vincent.

The workshop's events have been on hiatus and will, for now, continue online. SORAAAD will resume work on representation, through the focus of its series, Religion, Authoritarianism, and Public Narratives.

Attention to representation in research design, including what factors into how we understand religion and conceive of what we should study, were among the workshop’s originating concerns. In its most basic terms, representation is a means of characterizing and accounting for elements in “a sample” from which we generalize in order to characterize phenomena.

Representation conjures simultaneously the need to address the manufacture and designation of alterity and normativity (SORAAAD, 2012 PDF) , to cultivate a capacity to chart arrays of human expression and activity, to recognize and rectify voids, and to allow this work to change how we compare, explain, and conceptualize (Long, 1995; Moultrie, 2017, Compton et. al, 2017, Garland-Thomson, 2015)
...Continue reading.
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