Jeffersonian Blinders - Mary C. Segers and Ted G. Jelen, with an introduction by Clarke E. Cochran: A Wall of Separation? Debating the Public Role of Religion. (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998. pp. xx, 191. $48.50, $14.95, paper.) - John T. NoonanJr, The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom. (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998, pp. x, 436. $35.00.)

2000 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-169
Author(s):  
Stephen B. Presser
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
University Of California ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

Rome, Religion, and Christian Emperors

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-139
Author(s):  
Mattias P. Gassman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Public Decision

The controversy over the altar of Victory shows how pagans and Christians expressed competing ideas on the public role of religion in an increasingly Christian empire. In 382, Gratian revoked funding from the Roman state priesthoods and removed the altar from the Senate house. Following Gratian’s death in 383, the Senate appealed to his brother, Valentinian II, through the urban prefect, Symmachus, whose communiqué was successfully countered by Ambrose of Milan. Recent scholarship has favoured Symmachus’ account, which it sees as an appeal for religious tolerance, and argued that the affair was decided by the power politics of a child emperor’s unstable court. In response, this chapter argues that Symmachus was actually trying to exclude the emperor’s Christianity from public decision-making. All religions may, for Symmachus, lead to God, but the old cults are Rome’s divinely appointed defence, as well as the bond between Senate and emperors. Ambrose put Valentinian’s duty to God at the heart of his appeal. Ambrose’s Senate contained many Christians, and Ambrose was bound to resist an emperor who endorsed pagan sacrifices (the closest either work comes to explicit political gamesmanship). Together, their works show how malleable Rome’s public religion still was, more than seventy years after Constantine embraced Christianity.

Wall of Separation? Debating the Public Role of Religion

2000 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
James M. Penning ◽  
Mary C. Segers ◽  
Ted G. Jelen
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

Law and Religion in a Secular World: A European Perspective

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvio Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secular World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Role Of Religion

This article examines two interpretations of the process of secularisation that can be traced back through European legal and political thought, and a more recent trend that challenges both of them. It does this through the prism of the public sphere, because in today's Europe one of the most debated issues is the place and role of religion in this sphere, understood as the space where decisions concerning questions of general interest are discussed. The article concludes, first, that the paradigm through which relations between the secular and the religious have been interpreted is shifting and, second, that this change is going to have an impact on the notion of religious freedom and, consequently, on the recognised position of religions in the public sphere.1

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