In her interview, Catherine Wanner discusses the role of anthropological approach in studying religion, the difference between religion and faith, atheists campaigns in communist countries, religiosity and religious life of post-communist societies, and religious lessons of the communist era.
Yulia Razmetaeva is the Head of the Center for Law, Ethics, and Digital Technologies at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Ukraine)
We used to separate social life and face-to-face communications, as well as the country’s political life from what’s going on inside our gadgets. We appear to somehow separate the “people’s world” from the digital one. The truth of the matter, however, is that technologies have become so advanced they’ve embraced every aspect of the “people’s world.” Technologies’ influence is immense.
Having spread far beyond the limits of the digital world, technologies can literally define our lives, and not only in terms of everyday habits and preferences but also concerning issues important to society as democracy, rule of law, and human rights. The Cambridge Analytica case showed how dangerous it is to underestimate the impact of profiling and artificial contradictions in social media on elections. New technologies contribute to the fact that people find themselves in filter bubbles and spend more and more time with people who have similar views, rather than those who have different ones, which leads to narrow-mindedness, tunnel vision, and, therefore, intolerance.
Andrea Pin is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law & Religion Emory University
“The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer’s question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be–persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.”
This is Lord Atkins’s starting point in one of the most famous and important rulings of the House of Lords of the 20th century. Donoghoue v. Stevenson (1932) was a landmark judgment that set the limits of liability for negligence in a highly-industrialized society. Lord Atkins found it obvious to seek guidance on the issue of liability in Jesus’s oft-repeated statement that one should love her neighbor as herself. The idea of loving your neighbor was not just a moral compass—it was also a legal compass. The only contentious part was “who” had to be considered as a “neighbour.”