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This paper presents a reflection on the interaction, meaning, and function of popular religiosity within official religion. To do so, based on fieldwork carried out in Los Pedroches (Andalusia) and selecting three features that could be included in what has been categorized as religiosity: healings, promises, and participation in festive religious rituals, we have interpreted the meaning that the fact of sharing these practices has for some individuals who recognize themselves as non-believers, and, by extension, reflect on their place within religion. We observe how the socalled popular religious forms occupy a peripheral place but serve as a connection between both. Another point of view about the religiosity and the religion, a paper to reflect and to interpretate about these practices and the interpretation of these manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the accommodation of religion --governmental policies with a long-standing practice in United States constitutional law--, as well as the debates generated about the conformity of accommodation of religion with the two clauses on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Establishmente Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The paper analyzes also the main jurisprudence on accommodation of religion and the tests that have been constructed to judge this kind of policies, as the test Lemon and test Cutter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ministers of worship may carry out functions that have civil import; some religious acts have civil effects. Some religious professions do not limit the role of minister to men. Given that the rules and regulations of Ecclesiastical Law relating indirectly to women ministers of worship are scarce (Social Security), the purpose of this paper is to gain a clearer understanding of the situation and find out the number of women ministers who carry out religious functions that have civil effects. The Sub-Directorate General of Religious Freedom has been consulted to establish the number of ministers of worship included in the Registry of Religious Bodies, and religious organizations approached to see how many such ministers are women. At the same time, this analysis also provides further information on the functions that women carry out in religious organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the protection of religious freedom in the workplace by looking at the exceptions in current legislation governing the prohibition of discrimination on religious grounds, in line with European Directive 2000/78. Although it has not been transposed into Spanish law, this paper also addresses the right of religious denominations and ethos-based organizations to discriminate against workers on religious grounds and to require allegiance to their doctrine or ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article derives from an interinstitutional research project built, which took a qualitative approach and was conducted in eight major cities of Colombia using narrative methods. It aimed to inquire into the nature and pedagogical practices of Religious Education teachers, which is a fundamental and mandatory class under the General Education Act. Accounts of participating teachers showed different outlooks as to the identity and praxis of Religious Education in School (RES) but, within them, researchers' interest focused on an emerging perspective that regards this subject as a search for the cultivation of human spirituality. Therefore, this paper intends to present some contributions that RES can make to cultivate human spirituality because, when built from this perspective, it favors religious pluralism --preventing any exclusion arising from the dynamics of majority religious systems-- and enriches comprehensive education by providing educational opportunities for the search, construction and cultivation of the meaning of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics and religion have always been closely connected, as both depend on the manner in which man sees himself and the world around him. But one of the main features of democracy, the political system more widely accepted in the world today, is its secularization. Democracy no longer allows thrones, and religion has been reduced to one of the many possibilities individuals have when choosing how they want to live their lives. But every political system implies a different religion and vice versa. Democracy is not, in fact, the time of the end of religion, but a total reconfiguration of religious experience that could become considered the most authentic of all. This paper investigates the interdependence between politics and religion from the worldview that man has of himself in the context of democracy assuming the challenge posed to religious freedom from the political horizon as the task of the path of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of the decline of the modern state on the transformation of the Ius Publicum Ecclesiasticum Externum, a discipline that emerged alongside the rise in the late Middle Ages of a particular form of political organization known as the modern state. It analyzes the process by which the modern state emerged and developed, based primarily on the concept of sovereignty. The Church addressed this phenomenon through the development of the Ius Publicum Ecclesiasticum Externum. Amongst other factors, globalization and the eclipse of the concept of sovereignty are expected to lead to the decline of the modern state. These circumstances favor the transformation of the Ius Publicum, which tends to offer a universal vision that favors the protection of human rights and views the Church as a People of God, opening a greater space in which laypeople may foster the Christian spirit in the temporal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper departs from the consideration of the Inter-American system of human rights as a legal scenario resistant to religious disputes. The study of cases on religious freedom will offer a general approach to the contributions made by both the Commission and the Court to defend freedom of religion. This knowledge could be useful to solve eventual future religious problems in a pluralistic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to show the different legal consideration of decisions based upon religious convictions and those based upon personal preferences according to a vital autonomous project, specially, when these decisions means disobedience to law and a right to conscientious objection is claimed. After an analysis of Osmanoğlu y Kocabaş vs. Switzerland and other case laws, the author suggests a stronger legal protection of decisions based upon religious convictions and the consideration of autodetermination as a liberty more than as a right in the strict sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address religion from a legal perspective. I argue that religion should be settled outside the secular legal system; otherwise, the secular legal system would not be truly secular. However, religion demands special protection as a public good and social value, as it constitutes an extrinsic constitutional limit of the legal. For a secular legal system, protecting religion ultimately means protecting human beings' pursuit of the suprarational. Protecting suprarationality has three important legal consequences: (a) suprarational acts in the strictest sense should never be validated as legal acts; (b) democratic communities should not use suprarational arguments in legal discourse; and (c) the secular legal system cannot regulate suprarationality or the essentials of the religious community. The protection of religion demands both a dualistic structure that distinguishes the political community from the religious community and the treatment of religion as a right: the right to religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on the analysis of the evolution of the conscientious objection in the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court: at the beginning it has not received constitutional protection or was protected in a restricted manner, then it received recognition as a expression of freedoms of religion and conscience, and nowadays is categorized by the jurisprudence as a fundamental right. Moreover this article intends to illustrate the existence of a constitutional regulatory framework for conscientious objection, design to be applied in the different scenarios where it could be possible to claim it. This framework allows special rules just in the contexts where claiming the right to conscientious objection implies an opposition to other fundamental rights, but not in contexts where is opposed just to obligations. To do this, the article exposes the result of the analysis from the jurisprudential review of decisions of the Constitutional Court from 1992 to 2013 in five different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]