5/27 - Steven Mazie on The Trouble with Religious Freedom
Only two talks left this semester! This time we’re getting religious and judicial with Steven Mazie (Bard High School Early College), who will be joining us to speak on questions of religious freedom raised by two recent Supreme Court cases.
The Trouble with Religious Freedom
Drawing on two cases the Supreme Court will decide in the coming weeks as its primary touchstones, this talk will explore some contours of religious liberty in the American constitutional tradition. The First Amendment has not one but two clauses guaranteeing religious liberty — the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause — and at times these provisions come into conflict with one another. In short, rigorously keeping religion and state separate sometimes seems to impinge on individuals’ rights to worship freely, yet carving out special accommodations for religious believers can appear to put the government too firmly in the camp of the faithful and violate the separation between religion and state. Focusing on this term’s Greece v Galloway, a public prayer case in a Rochester, NY suburb and Hobby Lobby v Sebelius, in which a religious business is objecting to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide no-cost contraceptive care to their employees, the talk will look at two prime examples of this tension sewn into the First Amendment. In navigating the complex and often emotionally fraught waters of religious rights, the lecture will employ John Rawls’s method of moral reasoning known as “reflective equilibrium” to test audience members’ intuitions about similar cases and propose principles for approaching the controversies that give both aspects of religious freedom their due.
Usual place and time - 7:00 P.M. in the Info Commons lab at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. See you there!
