Tag: secularism

Bangladesh (Further) Surrenders Secularism

Posted on by

Kathryn Montalbano: This week, the Bangladeshi government has pushed to retain the state’s Islamic status, a move that requires an amendment to the constitution that originally declared Bangladesh secular and independent from Pakistan in 1971.  Bangladesh’s path to independence could almost be credited to Indian Muslims, who sought reprieve from social and political marginalization in 1947 for their new state, Pakistan.

Newly independent Bangladesh was intended to serve as an egalitarian nation in which Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus could peacefully coexist. Continue Reading →

What is the Public Square?

Posted on by

No longer the patch of pounded earth in the middle of town, is the public square the shrinking footprint of legacy media? Is it the more than 200 million blogs that exist in cyberspace? Is it the school board meeting? Or the assembly at our local high school? Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, doesn’t define the public square and yet argues that it is the primary contested space in the debate over separation of church and state. As Somerville rightly notes, varieties of faith (those unsavory to her — the “secular faiths” like environmentalism and scientism — she calls “isms”) are myriad and unrestrained (unrestrainable?), coloring all aspects of our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. So why so much concern that the isms are eradicating faith from the public square when she notes that all our messy voices are necessary for democracy to work? They’re not the right kinds of faith, apparently. Our laws are best informed by the non-isms, she argues. Which sounds a lot like an argument for privileging some faiths over others, in the public square, our courts, and elsewhere. Continue Reading →

Different Levels of Credibility Between Religions?

Posted on by

Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, “Is Godless Good?” Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism (“The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.”) and a professor at Houston Baptist University. So he’s decided to publish the entire interview himself. Continue Reading →