Human Dignity Initiative
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The Politics of Metanoia: Conscience, Community, and the Conditions of Human Flourishing
By Alexis de La Ferrière
Human flourishing depends on the interplay of individuation and communion—on the capacity of persons to develop as individual moral agents while doing so through relationships and shared forms of life. A well-ordered society must therefore protect both the freedom of the person and the associational ecology in which persons are formed, collaborate with others, and pursue shared goods. Religious freedom is particularly important in this respect. It protects not only individual conscience but also the institutions, communities, and collective practices through which persons may encounter and inhabit accounts of the good that are inherited or discovered, independent of the state.
When Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) adopted its Law on Freedom of Religion in 2004, it established the principles of separation between the state and religious communities, state neutrality toward all religious communities, equal treatment of religious communities before the law, and cooperation through agreements between the state (including its subnational units) and religious communities. The latter agreements are intended to regulate “issues of common interest.” This framework has led scholars to describe the relationship between the state and religious communities as one of “separation with cooperation.”
On 1 July 2026, Ireland took over from Cyprus the six-monthly rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, convening and presiding over the governments of the 27 EU member states until the end of 2026. On 7 July, Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin, presented his government’s legislative program to the plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, under three broad themes indicative of the current challenges facing the Union in an increasingly volatile geo-political context: competitiveness, security, and values. Two days later Prime Minister Martin met at Government Buildings in Dublin to discuss this program with representatives of Europe’s main Christian churches. After the meeting, Martin stated, “Our churches and faith communities play a unique role in European society—socially, culturally and spiritually.”
In Rubinstein v. The Minister of Defense (1998) and several subsequent cases, the Israeli Supreme Court invalidated executive branch administrative acts and Knesset laws granting exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva students. In its reasoning, the Supreme Court mainly referred to separation-of-power and equality issues. While he initially supported some of these decisions, Gideon Sapir (Bar-Ilan University) eventually changed his opinion for several reasons explained in this video.
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