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Vulnerable human beings in the earliest stages of life are especially at risk these days. Increasingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, we chemically induce abortions in the comfort of [...]

Although prior research documents a positive relationship between religious involvement and emotional well-being among incarcerated individuals, the salutary effect of religion on mental health remains in need of scientific scrutiny. To examine this understudied issue, we hypothesized that prisoner religiosity is positively associated with virtues, which are in turn inversely related to negative emotions. To test this hypothesis, we applied structural equation modeling to analyze data from a survey with a convenience sample of 139 males housed at a Colombian prison. As hypothesized, we found that both public (religious service attendance) and private religious behaviors (praying and reading a sacred book) were positively associated with the virtues of forgiveness, self-control, and gratitude. Additionally, we found that forgiveness and self-control were inversely related to state anger, depression, and anxiety. Finally, self-control was central in explaining the relationship between religious service attendance and state anger. Implications and limitations of the present findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether and how religion contributes to prisoner rehabilitation—conceptualized as a prosocial change in self-identity, existential belief, and character based on identity theories of criminal desistance, the "Good Lives Model" of offender rehabilitation, and the concept of human flourishing. For this study, we conducted a quasi-experimental study assessing a faith-based program, "The Prisoner's Journey" (TPJ). We hypothesized that participation in TPJ increased religiosity, which in turn contributed to rehabilitation, measured by identity transformation, a new sense of meaning and purpose in life, and virtue development. It was also hypothesized that prisoner rehabilitation enhanced emotional well-being and reduced the risk of interpersonal aggression. To test our hypotheses, we applied structural equation modeling to analyze data from 506 prisoners in Colombia and South Africa, who participated in pretest and posttest surveys. As hypothesized, we found that completion of TPJ increased religiosity, which in turn fostered motivation for identity change, the perception of meaning and purpose in life, and the virtues of forgiveness, accountability, and self-control. In addition, the increased perception of meaning and purpose in life and two virtues (forgiveness and self-control) decreased negative emotions and the risk of interpersonal aggression. The implications and limitations of our study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of Michael Hannon's article 'Against Heterosexuality' (March) that I find most interesting and valuable is the idea that 'heterosexuals' have attempted to wrest their own non-procreative sex out [...]

This paper examines whether religion contributes to offenders taking responsibility for crimes. Specifically, we assessed whether participation in The Prisoner's Journey (TPJ), a bible study program, increased or decreased responsibility-taking. We also examined whether religious offenders that did not participate in TPJ were likely to take responsibility for their offenses. For this study, we conducted a quasi-experiment in two Colombian and five South African prisons from 2018 to 2019, collecting data from personal interviews with a total of 73 inmates-42 TPJ participants and 31 non-participants-before and after the program. Offenders frequently offered subtle accounts of responsibility that incorporated their own agency with other factors. Highly religious offenders were equally likely to take responsibility, and in some cases participation in TPJ heightened responsibility. In sum, this paper presents evidence that religious beliefs and practice are commensurate with responsibility-taking and desistance from crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay criticises 'modest' one‐child policies, which would impose sanctions upon parents who create multiple children. Specifically, this article considers what the state owes individuals who would be born (illegally) beneath restrictive procreative policies and argues that such policies would fail to show due respect to second‐ or third‐born individuals created beneath them. First, I argue that modest procreative restrictions (like sanctions) are likely to generate only modest compliance. I then suggest it is reasonable to think a one‐child policy fails to demonstrate due respect to existing second and third children. I argue that such a policy generates an undue burden on any second or third children who would be born beneath them, before concluding by considering whether the state might be able to avoid effectively reinscribing 'bastardy' into its law by locating responsibility for the effects of such a policy entirely on the parents, rather than on children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of cases, some of them with a high media profile, suggest that freedom of religion or belief in the United Kingdom is being undermined by the operation of new equality laws. This article outlines the constitutional context for liberty and equality rights as well as the main ways in which religious liberty is secured by and within equality law. However, British equality law puts pressure on religious liberty in four ways: (1) it confines the relevance of 'religion' to limited social contexts; (2) it creates a priority for equality-perspectives over liberty-perspectives on social conflict; (3) it generates new social assumptions about what individuals have to believe and say (or refrain from saying) if they are to be trusted to uphold the law; (4) it provides legitimation for the imposition of contested comprehensive equality doctrines, some of which are inimical to civil liberty. In response, it is important to emphasise the role of equality law as a tool to secure mutual toleration and equal rights in the face of religious and ethical disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to Hauerwas's, O'Donovan's and Muir's engagements with Christ and the Common Life. Three distinctions that operate in the book are clarified, namely that between formal and informal politics, bottom-up forms of democratic politics and top-down forms of statecraft, and social and political relations. In setting these out, the distinction between public and private is critiqued and two, interrelated moves made in the book are defended. First, that democratic politics precedes and sustains a liberal polity. And second, that human law and the state should serve the antecedent and superordinate good of association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Bretherton's treatment of Pentecostalism and Black Power and how they conceive and challenge notions of democracy, citizenship and capitalism. Recognising the 'tensional' relationship between democracy and Christianity, I explore his treatment of Pentecostalism and capitalism. I am sympathetic to Bretherton's analysis of the socio-political transformation Pentecostalism offers, but point to regressive influences associated with the 'prosperity gospel'. Relating his treatment of Black Power to the wider 'Black radical tradition', I conclude with reference to political activism in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luke Bretherton wishes to encourage informal political activity, and asserts a contrast between two complementary and alternative ways of doing politics, formal and informal. But the tendency in his descriptions is to replace formal with informal politics, which is then in danger of being left without responsibility to the structures of political society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I try to introduce the overall structure of Bretherton's book Christ and the Common Life by showing how each chapter displays how talk of God and talk of politics are mutually constitutive. In particular I try to show how Bretherton's 'case studies' are arranged to develop his constructive thesis. My paper was not meant to be critical, though I raise the question of whether Bretherton's project is not a very sophisticated form of Constantinianism—a question that very much asks Bretherton to make clear for whom he has written this extremely impressive book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I aim to do two things. I offer an assessment of religious establishment according to liberal standards. I then ask how this analysis bears on Nigel Biggar's defence of Anglican establishment. I argue that only some features of Anglican establishment are compatible with the liberal standard of what I call minimal secularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the kind of religious establishment that currently obtains in England is sufficiently liberal in the sense that it accommodates rights to religious freedom and is compatible with political equality. What is more, insofar as it expresses a Christian anthropology, established Anglicanism can generate the 'thick' set of virtues necessary to make citizens capable of respecting liberal rights. In the course of defending its thesis, the argument disputes John Rawls's description of the 'overlapping consensus' as one that stands free of its supporting comprehensive doctrines; and it reads Martha Nussbaum as, ironically, confirming that an established orthodoxy of some sort is inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peculiar and particular manner in which freedom of religion is promoted and protected in the United Kingdom owes much to the nation's history. This article offers a highly selective consideration of some of the incidents of history which have shaped or foreshadowed the lived reality of freedom of religion in Britain today. It traces key episodes over past centuries, crudely categorised as the Seven Ages of Religious Liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically assesses an account of religious liberty often associated with several legal and political philosophers: Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager. Calling it the Religion as Comprehensive Doctrine approach (RCD), the author contrasts it with an account often attributed to John Locke and the American Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Two Sovereigns approach (TS). He argues that the latter provides an important corrective to RCD's chief weakness: RCD eliminates (or greatly diminishes) from our vision those aspects of religious belief and practice that most conventional religious believers would consider essential to their faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches' failure to respond to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction surveys the contributions to this issue, which were originally delivered at Oxford University in 2018. By exploring the interconnections and shared motifs, this article suggests that the answer to this symposium is a tentative 'yes', but that the sources of those threats arise from the background culture within which these papers are situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century American founders believed that religion is special and deserves special constitutional protection, and that all peaceable faiths must be drawn into the constitutional process and protection. The founders introduced six constitutional principles for the protection of religious freedom: freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and no state establishment of religion. Since the 1940s, the United States Supreme Court has upheld these religious freedom principles in more than 170 cases, albeit unevenly of late. Moreover, in recent years religious freedom has come under sharp popular and academic attack, particularly as religious pathologies have come to light and religious freedom claims have clashed with sexual liberty claims. This article calls for a return to the first principles of religious freedom for all, at home and abroad, and for a new balance between religious freedom and other fundamental rights claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores humanity's ontology of relationality and telos of the common good as not only inseparable but mutually constitutive, drawing on the work of Thomas Aquinas and looking into the debates between Charles De Koninck and Jacques Maritain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]