The Agnostic Age
Price:
$65.00 (06)Description
The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution is a book for lawyers, law professors, law students, lawmakers, and any citizen who cares about church-state conflict and about the relationship between religion and liberal democracy. It provides a way to understand and balance the conflicts that inevitably arise when neighbors struggle with neighbors, and when liberal democracy tries to reach common ground with religious beliefs and practices.Paul Horwitz argues that the fundamental reason for the church-state conflict is our aversion to questions of religious truth. By trying to avoid the question of religious truth, law and religion has ultimately only reached a state of incoherence. He asserts that the answer to this dilemma is to take "the agnostic turn": to take an empathetic and imaginative approach to questions of religious truth, one that actually confronts rather than avoids these questions, but without reaching a final judgment about what that truth is.
This book offers a sensitive and sensible approach to questions of church-state conflict, justifying what the courts have done in some cases and demanding new results in others. It explains how the church-state conflict extends beyond law and religion itself, and goes to some of the central questions at the heart of the troubled relationship between religion and liberal democracy in a post-9/11 era.
Features
- Offers an argument about church-state conflict that sets it apart from the conventional theories of religious liberty
- Provides a comprehensive guide to law and religion
- Offers a novel and valuable perspective on the popular and highly controversial topic of the "New Atheism" and its critics
- Proposes a new way of thinking about the church-state conflict in the realm of "culture wars" in the United States
- Appeals to both lawyers and non-lawyers and both religious and non-religious readers
Reviews
"This is a powerful, learned, eloquent and wonderfully accessible account of the multi-layered and intractable tensions between religion's commitment to doctrinal truths and the liberal state's commitment to a non theistic--which does not necessarily mean anti-theistic--political order. Professor Horwitz takes the reader on a tour of the scholarship and the issues as he makes his way through the minefield of the establishment and free exercise clauses with ease, good humor, and an infectious spirit of optimism."
--Stanley Fish
Davidson-Kahn Professor of Law and Humanities at Florida International University
"Taking truth (and therefore doubt) seriously-that's the central theme of this engaging book. In the midst of religious pluralism, a few scholars say our law of religious freedom must be based on what we believe to be true; more often, judges and scholars insist that our law must be detached from or 'neutral' toward religious truth. Professor Horwitz analyzes the problems with both positions. He proposes an alternative strategy which recognizes that we must act on what we believe to be true but that all our truths are profoundly contestable--and contested. This is a lively, insightful, and provocative book."
--Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego
"The confident predictions of religion's decline and disappearance have proved badly misguided. It is true today, as it always has been, that religious faith, commitments, authority, and activism matter to people, to communities, and therefore to the law. In this thoughtful, engaging book, Prof. Horwitz proposes that our law and politics should appreciate religion's importance and distinctiveness and take its truth-claims seriously. As he explains, a secular government that is appropriately agnostic toward these claims nevertheless may and should cherish and protect religious freedom."
--Richard W. Garnett
Professor of Law and Associate Dean
Notre Dame Law School
"Drawing on a combination of legal, cultural, and literary scholarship...The Agnostic Age is an accessible and timely book for readers interested in the connections between pluralism,
religion, and liberal democracy."
--Harvard Law Review
About the Author(s)
Paul Horwitz is the Gordon Rosen Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Notre Dame Law School, and the University of San Diego, among other places, and has spoken at some of the nation's leading law schools. He is widely published in the field of constitutional law and the First Amendment, and he has written extensively on law and religion. He is also a blogger at the popular legal blog Prawfsblawg. He is a lawyer in both Canada and the United States, a former editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, and a former law clerk for a federal appeals judge.
