Proportionality: A Way Forward for Resolving Religious Claims?
This essay gives an introduction to the idea of proportionality as a public law concept and argues that it is ideally suited to deciding conflicts between religious claims and the public interest or the rights of others. In particular it argues that a fact-specific resolution of claims can reduce societal tensions.
Should Religious Groups Be Exempt from Civil Rights Laws?
Should a private religious university lose its tax exempt status if it bans interracial dating? Should a religious school be able fire a pregnant married teacher because her continued work would violate the church's view that mothers of young children should not work outside the home? Should a religious social service agency, such as Catholic Charities, be exempt from a state regulation banning discrimination in the delivery of social services on the basis of sexual orientation? Should religious organizations be exempt from civil rights laws? This article argues that these questions raised difficult normative issues that have been answered practically by reference to the varying effects of historical social movements, producing the differential treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation laws. The article explores avenues for negotiating solutions other than full exemptions or no exemptions. Besides the instrumental goal of solving - or avoiding - complex political and legal problems, this question of stance injects the dimensions of virtue ethics and value-added negotiation. In so doing the article proposes ways to pursue productive stances toward clashes over religious exemption claims is highly relevant to sustaining and replenishing both American pluralism and constitutional protections for minority groups.
Heidegger On the Metaphor and Philosophy
to more logical analysis, quite crowd it out. His thought in the end is word-play and, in far too great a part, metaphor-play; and it is obvious that he has opted for poetry against serious and positive philosophic explanation. It need not be with disapproval, however, that one takes Heidegger’s work to be dominantly metaphorical. One could see it as a charging of the philosophic scene with new ways of understanding things, offering material to others for more careful elaboration, organization, and explication. A fairly recent study of Heidegger’s ’aesthetics’, for example, speaks admiringly and positively of the metaphorical weight of his ’Origin of the Work of Art’ :1 I