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The creation and interpretation of symbols is one of the few activities that could be properly defined metasocials and are, at the same time, metabiological. Still, the fate of symbols -- and especially of religious ones -- appears nowadays to be clearly in danger. As a matter of fact, someone would permanently remove them from the public space, imagining a city composed exclusively of lay and therefore neutral spaces. Examining the difference between symbol and sign, places and (non) places secularism and laicism, the present study intends to criticize the iconoclastic posture assumed by a part of the doctrine. In order to safeguard religious symbols from an unfair exile and justify their presence in public places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, clarified that there is no «secular state» but so many lay states as the ordinances that have decided to separate the temporal order from the spiritual one, according to the historically diverse and changing variables, is at the root of the problem arising from the tension --inherent in the legal phenomenon--; between kratos (power, strength), and ethos (justice, law as a limitation to the power). In particular, he studies in the historical and the theoretical way the function of judgment of power (and, consequently, the reawakening of force and moralization of politics) that governs religion, and clarifies the current semantic ambiguity of the secular term in one political-juridical culture (even in canon law) strongly conditioned by the dominant positivism and the absence of effective limits to the spread of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se presenta una introducción en la que el autor comenta sobre los artículos en este número, los cuales enfocan en la secularización y la laicidad.

The secular model of the State is propounded, among other countries, by Spain and Turkey, both of which played a decisive role in the defense of an ambitious and alluring "Alliance of Civilizations", forged as an alliance between the Islamic and Occidental civilizations. Here we will demonstrate how these countries, so closely linked to the objective of achieving an "Alliance of Civilizations", would come to defend religious principles diametrically opposed to this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While positions on the public role of religion in Western societies are polarized primarily into the secular and secularism, for some years there have been a series of arguments that do not seem to fit either in one or the other category. They therefore suggest a revision of the model that the West has assumed to be secular and politically correct when encompassing the relationship between politics and religion. These ideas are held by non-Catholic intellectuals, including some who are not believers. They argue for the re-visioning of secularization from different scientific and epistemological positions: historical, philosophical, sociological, political theory, theological and others. The objective of this paper is to briefly describe these and also set forth the problems associated with this discussion when establishing human rights, an area of particular sensitivity due to the interaction between politics and religion in the contemporary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]