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Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianism and Islamism are principal religion of the world. They have various branches in which people of the world keep faith differently. Every religion mentions about to maintain good conduct and salvation. Out of them, Hindu Philosophy believes that the God is universal and has equal eyes to all the creatures. It is the creator and controller of each and every substance of the universe. The universe is developed by the mind and wisdom of the God. There are always male character and female character to make the universe possible. It evokes faith, devotion, spiritual and consciousness to mankind. It believes that idol is a symbol to represent god. Ultimate god is without any shape, form and size, which may enter in any living and non living things as per necessity. Human life is precious which is acquired only after good deeds after crossing all chain of living beings. So, a human being must utilize it for salvation. Reincarnation is continuous process until salvation for certain period of time. The soul is immortal, which is the smallest particle of the god substance.

Islamic religion doesn’t worship idols. It has been evolved and developed in central Asia. As a text, Quran, Sunna, Ijma, and Kiya are the traditional sources of Islamic legal system. It doesn’t confirm ancient customs. This religion was founded by the Prophet Mohammad. He was considered as messenger of the god. It recommends for five time daily prayer and donation of two and half percent of the income of the people. Contemporary Islamic Legal System is existed together either with Common Legal System or Civil Legal System or Socialist Legal System. Modern sources of law i.e. legislation, delegated legislation, precedent, equity, justice and good conscience are largely applied to maintain law and order in the society. Each and every Islamic person is recommended to make full devotion to the god and make fasting in Ramadan. Each devotee is recommended to go for Hazz at least once in their lifetime.

This paper investigates the role of religious philosophy in determining investor behaviour by examining differences in herding across Shariah and non-Shariah compliant firms in the global energy market. Our sample comprises 2501 globally listed energy equities from 10 April 2019 to 08 April 2020 from the Refinitv Eikon database, which also flags firms as compliant or otherwise with Shariah or Islamic law. Using closing price data for the selected firms, we analyze herding behaviour across the two groups, in addition to various firm and market characteristics such as size, profitability, analyst recommendations about future performance and up and down market days. Our results suggest herding in both Shariah and non-Shariah-compliant energy firms, and on down market days in particular. Cross-sectional tests indicate higher herding in larger and more-profitable Shariah firms, and those with positive analyst forecasts for the future, which is consistent with pressure-driven behaviour to maintain performance. In particular, we find that the COVID-19 pandemic does not significantly alter herding behaviour for the sample firms.

Major legal system i.e. common legal system, civil legal system, socialist legal system, Islamic legal system and Hindu legal system are dominant across the globe to maintain law and justice. Initially all these legal systems had separate identity. But, these legal systems are operated in hybrid form sustaining their previous legacy to the large extent in contemporary time. Common legal system accepts precedent as a primary source of law whereas civil legal system doesn’t recognize it. As a philosophical thought, Islamic and Hindu religions are based on their religious scriptures and practices. Nowadays religious philosophies are amalgam either with common law or civil law or socialist legal system. Because of the globalization, it is expected that the legal system of the world is going toward homogeneity rather than heterogeneity. Uniformity is expected out of heterogeneity concept of world legal system. International law and multilateral agencies supported to unify the world legal system. There is the unification and harmonization process of the world legal system. In a long run, the world communities are going to follow similar principles but the sanction provision may vary from country to country in upcoming era of legal regime. Legal system is necessary to follow by the application of consensus approach. Better practices can be adopted and received or interchanged from all kinds of legal system for the betterment of own legal system.

There are two ways in which one can address the freedom of religious organizations. The first is to propose that freedom of religion is a right possessed by individuals and that the rights of groups, collectives or corporate entities derive from the rights of the individuals that constitute such groups. The second is to propose that groups, collectives and corporate entities are themselves entitled to religious freedom as such, without any need to show how it derives from the rights of individuals. Jane Calderwood Norton’s book, Freedom of Religious Organizations, adopts the first approach, and presses it just about as far in the direction of protecting the organizational dimensions of religious freedom as can be conceived. As an exercise in thinking through the implications of such a starting point, it is an exemplary work. However, approaching freedom of religion in this way is to impose a view that few religious adherents would themselves recognise. Many religions are deliberately communal in their practices and beliefs, and they do not regard membership of a religion as an exercise of personal autonomy. Norton also frames the question as if it is the state that has final authority to determine the content and limits of religious freedom. However, this is to frame the question in a manner that places the state and its institutions in a superior position that is not justified by the historical record of states in their treatment of religious minorities. It would be better if the future of religious freedom were negotiated between religion and state, rather than determined by the state unilaterally.

A growing number of scholars think “religious liberty” is a bad idea. The unfairness objection is that singling out religion for special protection is unjust to comparable nonreligious conceptions of the good. The distraction objection asserts that religious liberty is a misleading lens: oppression sometimes occurs along religious lines, but the underlying conflicts often are not really about religious difference. Both objections are sound, but under certain conditions religious liberty should nonetheless be regarded as a right. Law is inevitably crude. The state cannot possibly recognize each individual’s unique identity-constituting attachments. It can, at best, protect broad classes of ends that many people share. “Religion” is such a class. Where it is an important marker of identity for many people, it is an appropriate category of protection.

The realities of a contemporary Montreal neighbourhood with a substantial Chasidic Jewish population reveal ongoing negotiation of community contours and intersecting ways in which respect and room for religious practices and norms, groups and individuals, are generated and sustained. A range of examples of community life, with an emphasis on education, shows that a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom for faith-based institutions or collectives is neither the only, nor the most desirable, form of recognition for religious communities. Any notion of collective religious freedom that attempts to fix the contours and normative structures of a religious institution or community should be subject to serious challenge. Indeed, as the paper illustrates, religious communities can evolve and flourish despite, and even because of, the absence of formal collective rights and freedoms.

Social influence of the religious phenomenon, is a complex phenomenon, especially in contemporary society, which takes account of certain indicators such as: context of religious freedom, religious language or religious speech, religious affiliation, religious practice; attitudes of religious groups or religious institutions on society and on social security; the impact of specific religious groups, secret societies, mysteries on the population firms. In order to be objective and to have the right attitude towards certain aspects that define contemporary society issues on the globalization, integration, secularism, atheism indifference, pluralism, it is first necessary that these issues be carefully studied, known and understood in the context of contemporary society. The phenomenon of secularization, globalization, religious indifference, not social issues but social phenomena, specific ways of expression of contemporary society.

Religions have been played a significant role in shaping and cultivating morals in different stages of time. Ancient literature presents influence of religious code of conduct in political administration, economic decisions, use of resources and behaviour with contemporary living and non-living components of environment. This paper is an attempt to probe a word about sustainable development in selected religious and faith philosophies.

When the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act was enacted in 2006 it was claimed that the Act would protect the rights of all persons, whatever their gender, age, disability, income, background or religion. Purporting to follow the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the Charter proclaimed the right of every person to "freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief", including the "freedom to demonstrate his or her religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching, either individually or as part of a community, in public or in private". Despite the assurances of the Victorian Charter, however, many people of religious faith in Australia feel that their freedom to practice their religion is under threat – no less in Victoria than elsewhere in the country. Moreover, the principal concern articulated by religious believers is a sense that it is the state and its agencies, not other religious believers, that poses the greatest threat to freedom of religion. If it is one of the purposes of the liberal democratic state to ensure the peaceful coordination and flourishing of different groups, this is not a very promising state of affairs.In this chapter, written for a forthcoming collection on the impact of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights, we interrogate the state of religious freedom in Victoria, focusing on the threats that it faces, both manifested and perceived. The chapter begins by sketching the various religious freedom protections that exist in Australian law and note legislation, especially in Victoria, that has raised religious liberty concerns – anti-discrimination, anti-vilification and abortion law in particular. The chapter then surveys the case-law under the Charter. Here we find that the Charter has played virtually no substantive role in protecting freedom of religion. Instead, anti-discrimination law has been increasingly prioritised. Lastly, we offer an account of three recent reviews of Victorian law as they relate to religion. We find that a contest has occurred, primarily between religious believers and organisations on one hand, and anti-discrimination agencies and human rights advocates on the other, over the exact boundaries to be laid down in state law between religious freedom and other state interests. We argue that an underlying pattern is discernible, whereby a certain image of liberal citizenship is progressively imposed upon persons, groups and organisations whose religious convictions, practices or identities are deemed to be recalcitrantly non-liberal. We conclude that, as a result, religious freedom has become a second-class right in Victoria. Managing serious and growing pluralism, we argue, requires deeper attention to fundamental principles of religious liberty.

After the Cold War, the universe has become seemingly divided on religious grounds. It seems that globalisation has not stamped out religious differences. Globalisation has in many ways intensified religious division. How does globalisation cause this phenomenon? The aim of this paper is to chart the essence of religion in a seemingly divided world. It attempts to do this by exploring the different contexts of religion in order to explain ‘how’ and ‘why’ religious extremism may become a force in non-Western societies. The paper also seeks to explore whether religion is still relevant in Western societies.

Based on her recently published book, "Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion", Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s paper is an attempt at disaggregating the category of religion. It distinguishes between forms of knowledge about religion (including constructs of religious extremism and religious freedom) authorized by experts (expert religion); religion as construed and authorized by governments and courts at home and abroad (official or governed religion); and the broader fields of spiritual practices, beliefs, and forms of belonging on the ground (lived or everyday religion) which are entangled with but not reducible to expert or official religion.

Does freedom of religion protect religious institutions, or does it only protect the individual religious conscience? Canadian jurisprudence after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes a decidedly individualist turn, deliberately avoiding the question of the rights of religious institutions. This individualist focus neglects the historical trajectory of religious freedom, the social understanding of religious faith by religious adherents themselves, and the institutional structures in which religion emerges and develops, and though which it is ultimately protected. An institutional account of religious liberty can complement the individualist account, as it better explains the legal order, better reflects actual religious practice, and better preserves both institutional and individual religious liberty. Recent decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada go some way towards correcting this individualist bias, but balk at resolving the legal status of religious institutions. This persistent ambiguity will prove problematic in controversies over religious autonomy already making their way through the courts.

This essay has two parts. It begins with an introduction to the 1998 U.S. International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the bureaucratic and administrative structures it created. This programming is the latest installment in a history of U.S. attempts to promote American strategic interests through social and religious engineering projects abroad. During the Cold War, the U.S. sought to secure "global spiritual health." Today it promotes religious freedom. The second part analyzes the political consequences of employing the discourse of religious freedom in a specific context. It explores responses to the Arab spring and the conflict in Syria that emphasize the dangers of Christian persecution. By foregrounding religion over other social ties, it is argued, this response lends itself to interpretations of the Syrian war as a sectarian conflict in which the rights of Syrian Christians will be threatened by the political empowerment of a Sunni majority. Relying on religion as a policy category thus obscures complex causal factors on the ground, and, by reducing conflict to "religious" warfare, makes it more difficult to respond intelligently to the complex causes of violence in Syria.

Surveys show that Democrats are less religious than Republicans. Academics and causal observers alike assume that this pattern has arisen because religious beliefs influence political identities. But, might political identities also affect religious beliefs? In this paper, I show that religious attitudes both shape and are shaped by political identities. I develop a theory that explains when and why partisanship ought to affect religious attitudes by drawing on the religious and political socialization literatures. Briefly, partisanship typically crystallizes in adolescence and early adulthood, which is the very time when religion is typically on the back burner for most individuals. As young people emerge into adulthood, however, they must decide whether to remain on the outskirts of religion or re-enter the religious realm. Political identity, which for many has been solidified since young adulthood, can help shape this new religious identity. Using both a natural and an Internet experiment to test my theory, I find that when people are in the process of raising children – a time that often pulls them back into the religious fold – their partisanship changes their reported religious behavior. In contrast to the common assumption that one’s religious beliefs drive political attitudes in a unidirectional fashion, I find that the relationship also works in the other direction. Although many bemoan religion’s role in creating a polarized political arena, this blame may be unfairly assigned as partisans themselves help produce an increasingly polarized electorate.

This article seeks to understand the impact of religious diversity on religious tolerance in developing countries and draws lessons from the case of Nigeria. Religious diversity has appeared to prompt religious intolerance in Nigeria when we view the country from a distance. However, this article reveals important subnational variation. Using original survey data collected in 2006, I compare the impact of religious observance on respect for religious freedom across four settings within Nigeria and find religious observance was having, at the time of the survey, a more positive impact on respect for religious freedom in the most religiously diverse and integrated of the four settings. In-depth interviews indicate that Christian and Muslim religious leaders more openly encouraged religious tolerance in religiously diverse and integrated settings than in religiously homogenous settings. Substantively, this study suggests that religious segregation rather than religious diversity has inhibited religious tolerance in Nigeria and provides a baseline for assessing how changes in religious diversity and sociopolitical conditions across time affect the likelihood that Christianity and Islam are applied in ways that promote or impede tolerance. Methodologically, it reveals the importance of examining individual-level data and subnational variation when attempting to understand the political impact of religion in any country.

Is there a religious way to pump gas, sell groceries, or advertise for a craft store? Litigation over the HHS contraceptive mandate has raised the question whether a for-profit business and its owner can engage in religious exercise under federal law. The federal government has argued, and some courts have found, that the activities of a profit-making business are ineligible for religious freedom protection. This article offers a comprehensive look at the relationship between profit-making and religious liberty, arguing that the act of earning money does not preclude profit-making businesses and their owners from engaging in protected religious exercise.Many religions impose, and at least some businesses follow, religious requirements for the conduct of profit-making businesses. Thus businesses can be observed to engage in actions that are obviously motivated by religious beliefs: from preparing food according to ancient Jewish religious laws, to seeking out loans that comply with Islamic legal requirements, to encouraging people to “know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” These actions easily qualify as exercises of religion.It is widely accepted that religious freedom laws protect non-profit organizations. The argument for denying religious freedom in the for-profit context rests on a claimed categorical distinction between for-profit and non-profit entities. Yet a broad examination of how the law treats these entities in various contexts severely undermines the claimed categorical distinction. Viewed in this broader context, it is clear that denying religious liberty rights for profit-makers would actually require singling out religion for disfavored treatment in ways forbidden by the Free Exercise Clause and federal law.

This article argues that “creed” and religion should be understood as something that informs what a person takes into the public and that necessarily includes beliefs that may (and often do) influence “morals and ethics” and even “politics.” Second, religion may be diminished because, with respect to religious employers, there has been insufficient attention to the kind of religious project that is at issue when an employee challenges the employer’s religious rules. The focus has been, in some cases, on the kinds of job duties rather than the nature of the religious association or project itself. An approach to the latter, called by some and “organic” approach views religious projects as wholes and does not subordinate them to an unduly individualistic reading in the way that “job parsing” tests do.

It is commonly believed that, from a liberal point of view, there is something problematic in government action rooted in religious considerations. We begin by showing exactly what kind of religious considerations might thought to be ruled out as a basis for such action. We then discuss at length the approach expressed by the Supreme Court of Israel, according to which legislation and other government actions based on religious considerations are problematic because they violate the right to freedom from religion of non-religious citizens. We reject the court’s interpretation of this right and conclude that the court has failed to explain why government action based on religious considerations is illegitimate.

The growing religious diversity in European societies poses important policy challenges in various domains of social life. The new religious landscape means that European states not only have to cope with inhabitants with varying commitments to Christianity as well as with humanists, agnostics, atheists, and Jewish and/or Muslim minority populations, but in many instances also with a ‘super-diverse’ range of other religious cultures and traditions which have entered Europe by way of immigration and conversion. Challenges with the position of Islam have been most visible, prompting a number of states to adopt restrictive measures on religious dress, family life and places of worship.This policy brief discusses a number of recommendations proposed by the RELIGARE project on on religion or belief discrimination in employment and reasonable accommodations for employees’ religious or philosophical beliefs or practices in the workplace.

The great majority of books on religious diversity forgo an analysis of religious materials in favour of a focus on doctrine, scripture and governmental policy. This paper argues that the material aspects of religion -- from statues and monuments of deities, to revered religious artworks, to talismans, amulets, and even sacred cars -- are absolutely crucial to the formation of Southeast Asian religious subjectivities, and in turn impact significantly upon social cohesion in an age of religious pluralism. It is in the way in which the faithful engage with religion’s tangible forms that faiths reiterate their quintessential characters and boundaries, thus enabling them to negotiate their co-existence with other competing belief systems in their midst. When seen in the context of religious diversity, an understanding of religious materials speaks volumes about wider debates concerning the challenges of secularization, pluralism, religious competition and the management of inter-faith interaction.

How we understand the nature of the public sphere and the fact that all citizens are believers and have faith (but not necessarily religious beliefs and faith) is important to treating all beliefs (including religion) fairly in the public sphere. This article argues for a re-understanding of foundational (but often unexamined) ideas such as “secular” and “secularism”, “faith,” “beliefs,” “diversity” and “liberalism.” It argues that an atheistic or agnostic dominance of the public sphere is unfair and, when the principles are understood properly, unconstitutional. The article examines the law and recent cases in South Africa and Canada against a backdrop of each country’s constitutional provisions, as well as recent philosophical arguments, to suggest that key terms and phrases such as the “separation of church and state” and the relationship between religion and equality need to be re-understood in order for pluralism and liberalism to be properly related to human freedom (understood in its personal and communitarian dimensions) and to be properly protected and encouraged by law and politics.

Given that religion drives people’s behavior and actions in a more productive direction, it is not possible to separate religion from development. After a meticulous review of theory and empirical literature, the paper concludes that the relationship between religion and development is likely to be complementary as long as religious beliefs and practices promote ‘moderation’ rather than ‘extremes’. A peaceful co-existence of various religious groups (or sects) within a country and nations with multiple religious affiliations within the global community at large remains the essential prerequisite for growth and prosperity in today’s highly interconnected world, argued in the paper.

Religious principles, religious problems, and religious enthusiasts have all played profound, if sometimes little appreciated roles in the development of international law.' This essay highlights the impact of religion on international law by providing a sampler of religious experiences in international law, to wit: three suspicions international lawyers have of religion, two contributions made between religion and international law, and one great and telling similarity between religion and international law.

In this new book, "Constantine's Standard," I want to explore the relationship between religion, violence, politics and law - specifically, how the liberal political tradition has approached the problem (the liberal compact), how that approach was historically conditioned by Western culture, and how it needs to be adapted to address contemporary challenges to peace and stability associated with religion. Chapter Five, "The Many Faces of Violent Faiths," attempts to outline a typology of religious organizations or associations prone to religiously identified violence. In considering how religious violence has manifest itself in the West and other countries that have adopted the liberal religious compact, we can see five distinct versions: charismatic-Apocalyptic cults; justice movements; ethno-religious groups; religious nationalist movements; and the globalized holy war. As is the case with any typology, these are broad stroke characterizations, roughly drawn to identify key features. Given the complexity of and interaction among society, culture and religion, a particular religious group may include characteristics that would allow it to be categorized under a variety of these labels, depending upon the perspective taken. Nonetheless, highlighting these typologies offers some descriptive clarity and suggests areas of potential political response.

The law of the religion clauses is primarily a judicial exercise in mediating the inherent conflict between the clauses, for some accommodations of religion are required by the free exercise clause and other accommodations of religion are prohibited by the establishment clause. Judicial mediation of this tension will produce one of four distinctive patterns, each characterized by the relative degree of deference the judiciary displays toward legislative judgments of appropriate accommodation that are claimed to offend the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, or both. Judicial primacy is the pattern in which the Court displays the least deference toward legislative judgments of religious accommodation, by means of robust enforcement of both clauses. Legislative primacy is the polar opposite of judicial primacy. Under legislative primacy the Court defers to legislative judgments of religious accommodation by lax enforcement of both clauses. Judicial secularism is a pattern by which the Court vigorously enforces the establishment clause and loosely enforces the free exercise clause, thus restricting the ability of legislatures to decide when to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but leaving them with relatively greater freedom to decide whether or not to accommodate religious conduct. Judicial accommodation is a pattern by which the Court energetically enforces the free exercise clause to require many accommodations of religious conduct, but is less willing to strike down other types of accommodations that allegedly violate the establishment clause. The result of judicial accommodation is that legislatures are given considerable freedom to accommodate religion without violating the establishment clause, but are required to accommodate religious conduct. When the law of the religion clauses began to develop in earnest in the middle of the twentieth century it developed toward the judicial primacy pattern, but as the century, waned and turned the millenial milepost the law of the religion clauses has begun to assume the shape of legislative primacy. This change has been influenced by political and cultural changes. The de facto Protestant establishment that persisted from the nation's beginning to the twentieth century collapsed by mid-century and in its wake a new coalition of religious and secular allies began to press for broader governmental assistance to religion. At the same time the age of modernity - the Enlightenment commitment to rationalism as the avenue to truth, which had replaced the medieval commitment to religious faith - began to be undermined by post-modernism, the belief that there are no universal truths. Modernity had posed a conflict between two competing explanations of truth; post-modernism accepts that no account can be known to be true. The paradoxical result is that religion has been freed from the margins to which modernity had consigned it. Moreover, much of traditional religion has been replaced by a distinctively post-modern spirituality, a preoccupation with self-understanding that borrows eclectically from many ways of apprehending transcendent reality, both religious and secular. The resulting religious pluralism has increased the pressure upon political actors to accommodate a variety of religions and, simultaneously, made imperative the need to avoid compelling governments to accommodate the limitless variety of conduct that may be the product of religious belief. Legislative primacy produces both behavioral and doctrinal effects. The principal behavioral effect is to encourage a political marketplace of religion, in which religious and secular actors engage in rent seeking in the form of government benefits to religion. Benefits, however, can come in the form of favors bestowed on any given rent seeker or burdens placed on rival rent seekers. By-products of religious rent seeking include increased proselytizing, because successful proselytizers will secure an advantage in religious rent seeking, and increased contentiousness concerning the proper role of religion in public life. The likely doctrinal effects of legislative primacy include the terminal irrelevance of Lemon, increased emphasis on non-discrimination between religious groups, a sharper conflict between the competing endorsement and coercion tests for detecting establishment clause violations, and a heightened judicial focus upon the legislative purpose underlying ostensibly neutral measures that deliver religious effects. While it is too soon to know whether legislative primacy will ameliorate or exacerbate religious conflict; it is not too soon to declare that we are entering a new era of the law of the religion clauses. Perhaps the metaphysics of post-modernism will produce sufficient religious toleration that the political dynamic of religious rent seeking will moderate, and the result will be an increase in aggregate preference satisfaction without destabilizing side effects. But it is also possible that the mixture of extreme religious pluralism, post-modern uncertainty, and religious rent seeking will prove to be a volatile mixture.

Contemporary Supreme Court interpretations suggest that the religion clauses are primarily rooted in the value of equality. In interpreting the Free Exercise clause the United States Supreme Court has argued that in the absence of discrimination against religion or in the presence of other constitutional values, there is no violation of the Constitution when a statute inadvertently burdens religion. Similarly, equality values have played a strong role in the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Many distinguished commentators have pointed to the equality focus and have argued that it gives insufficient attention to the value of religious liberty. Professor Shiffrin argues that these commentators are right in contending that an equality emphasis misses much of importance in religion clause jurisprudence, but their emphasis on liberty or equal liberty is too narrow. Instead, he suggests an understanding of the proper place of equality in religion clause jurisprudence requires an appreciation of a wider range of values. Professor Shiffrin recognizes that the equality value is important, but shows that many deviations from religious equality are deeply embedded in the framework of government operations. It will not work to maintain that our Constitution regards religion and non-religion as equal. Indeed, the religion clauses are best interpreted to protect religion not just because of values like autonomy, equality, community, and religious peace, but because religion is regarded as important. This, he suggests, is a regrettable interpretation. It obviously is a bitter pill for religious skeptics to swallow, and it should even be a source of regret for most religious believers. Nonetheless, it is the best reading of our evolving Constitution. The foundational view that religion is important, however, does not flirt with theocracy. Far from it. The Constitution forbids coercion and, with exceptions, the favoring of one religion over another. Even more important, with some exceptions, the Constitution is best interpreted to curb government intervention to favor religion, not because religion is a constitutional stepchild, but because the seductions of governmental dependence are great and because government is not to be trusted. In applying his analysis, Professor Shiffrin explores many examples including (1) the ingestion of peyote; (2) animal sacrifice; (3) the government's use of religious symbols; (4) government's involvement with monotheistic prayer, including the Pledge of Allegiance; (5) the teaching of evolution in the public schools; (6) government protection of conscientious objectors and those who refuse to work on the Sabbath; and (7) voucher programs together with government support for religion within the public schools. Given the pluralistic character of the values underlying the religion clauses and the variety of contexts in which questions about the legal status of religion arise, he concludes, that equality can best be seen as one important value in a rich and evolving tradition. This tradition, he argues, is misunderstood by both the secular left and the religious right. The secular left does not understand the importance of religion in our constitutional tradition, and the religious right does not understand that government harms religion when it tries to help. Neither the secular left, nor the religious right understands the complex dimensions of religious equality.

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to the idea of rational economic behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. We test this hypothesis on communal societies for whom mutual cooperation is a matter of survival. We design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim. Our results show that religious males (the primary practitioners of collective religious ritual in Orthodox Judaism) are more cooperative than religious females, secular males and secular females. Moreover, the frequency with which religious males engage in collective religious rituals predicts well their degree of cooperative behavior. We use our results to understand differences in the returns to religious observance in capitalist and developing economies.

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of religious activity in the public sphere. Political candidates of both parties loudly pronounce their individual faith and link. that faith directly to their political values. Candidates use religious gatherings as political podiums and confidently assert that their God and His teachings define the country's very nature. Meanwhile, activities conducted by religious groups in public schools have become both more numerous and more prominent in the last decade. These activities include public prayer sessions at graduation ceremonies and extracurricular events, meetings by religious organizations on public school properly, prayer sessions around flagpoles outside public school buildings, and religious assemblies on school property, sometimes during the school day. Religious activities by groups of adults in public spaces other than schools have also multiplied. Religious groups conduct large-scale religious ceremonies in public parks, erect religious displays inside and outside public buildings, and even build permanent religious structures on public land.

Religion stood at the center of the American stage during the years of the Clinton presidency. The Congress passed, and the President signed, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ("RFRA") - the most dramatic and extensive piece of legislation addressing freedom of religion issues in our nation's history. In a dramatic upset, the Republican Party took over Congress in 1994, fueled in large part by the mobilization of Christian conservatives. The House of Representatives voted on a prayer-in-the-schools amendment for the first time in almost thirty years. Governments began experimenting with providing social services through faith-based organizations because of dissatisfaction with the success rate of secular-based efforts. Instances of school violence that had captured national attention were ascribed by some to the absence of religion from public education. Religiously defined hate groups and militias proliferated. The most controversial and inflammatory law enforcement event of the decade involved the efforts of the federal government to arrest the leader of a religious cult in Waco, Texas. Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act, which established the fight against religious persecution as an international relations priority and established an office in the State Department to promote international religious freedom. The United States intervened in a war in Europe that had been stoked by religious hatred and division. The list goes on. Against this background, Professors Randy Lee and Marci Hamilton offer diametrically opposed normative and descriptive assessments of the role of religion in politics. Normatively, Lee believes that in our constitutional system, religion should be an active player in political affairs. Hamilton contends that the role of religion should be more circumscribed. Descriptively, Lee believes that religion has been inappropriately marginalized in American political life. Hamilton asserts that, if anything, religion has been too active a participant in the political scene. Lee and Hamilton, however, share one common point of agreement. Lee, explicitly, and Hamilton, implicitly, both recognize that religion can be, and often is, a potent political force. Part II of this comment will address and support the point explicitly offered by Professor Lee - the claim that religion is political. This section will argue, however, that the political manifestation of religion is not confined to the instances when religion becomes involved in express political activity, such as lobbying or partisan politics. Rather, religion must be understood as a pervasive social force that has an inevitable political effect. Part III will address whether religion has been inappropriately marginalized in the public culture. It will show that the purported marginalization is more a matter of perception than reality. While it is true that there is a popular perception that religion has been inappropriately marginalized in American life, the reality is that religion has retained its power as a social and political force. Part III will also attempt to explain the discrepancy between the reality and the perception of the marginalization claim. Part IV will address the normative debate regarding the role of religion and politics, and suggest that there are legitimate reasons why the overt involvement of religion in politics should be treated with some caution. Finally, Part V will use the example of school prayer as an example of why the mix of religion and politics can be harmful to the interests of both politics and religion.