Understanding Religious Freedom: Why Does It Matter?

Nicholas Aroney is a professor of constitutional law at The University of Queensland, a senior fellow of the Centre for Law and Religion at Emory University, and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law. The following post is based on his remarks during the panel “Understanding Religious Freedom: Why Does It Matter?” at the ICLRS 31st Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 7 October 2024.

We live in a time when it is especially important to understand religious freedom and why it matters. There are places today where religious freedom is not regarded as a constitutional principle either because the official policy of the state is to enforce a form of secular atheism or because the official policy is to enforce a particular religion to the exclusion of all others.

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Dignity, Deference, and Discrimination: Religious Freedom in America’s Prisons

Elyse Slabaugh received a JD in 2024 from the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University. This post is based on an article published in the BYU Law Review.

Incarceration by its nature denies a prisoner participation in the larger human community. To deny the opportunity to affirm membership in a spiritual community, however, may extinguish an inmate’s last source of hope for dignity and redemption.[1]

The difficulties of prison administration create the potential for prisons to succumb to neglect, racism, and religious intolerance and for prison officials to curtail inmates’ rights not only when necessary, but also when merely convenient.[2]

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Is Religious Freedom a Forgotten Freedom Within the Human Security Framework?

Elena López Ruf is a lawyer who teaches philosophy of law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and “Religion and the Global World” at Austral University. This post is based in part on her chapter “Religious Freedom, Human Security, and Human Fraternity: Is Religious Freedom a Forgotten Freedom Within the Human Security Framework?” in Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law: International Perspectives (Routledge 2023).

Today it is the humanity of man that is no longer self-evident, and the issue we face is: How can a human being achieve certainty of his humanity?[1]

—Abraham J. Heschel

At the end of the Second World War, a legal revolution was taking place with a new world order in which (1) war was outlawed, (2) human rights became the “Magna Carta” of international relations, and (3) a new framework of international cooperation was set for the development and flourishing of humanity.[2]

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