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The article analyzes legal, constitutional and philosophical disputes over religious liberty involving speech or expression. Topics discussed include Two-Sovereigns Thesis versus the Religion is Not Special (RNS) thesis, treatment of religious speech as special and non-special in the U.S. Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence and under the Religion Clause of the First Amendment, and RNS view in accounting for the religious nature of certain types of cases in U.S. jurisprudence.

The article explores the right of natural parents to direct the religious formation of their children. Topics discussed include the status of a pre-political fundamental right to be recognized by the government under the U.S. Constitution, the views of Catholic scholars Romanus Cessario and Mary McAleese on parental rights and the rite of baptism, and how these views can offer glimpse of how the rejection of extra-governmental moral authority provides a basis for illiberal policy prescriptions.

The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, Volume I: Odyssey of the Religion Clauses. By James Hitchcock. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. np. The Supreme Court and Religion [...]

Religion in the Liberal Polity. Edited by Terence Cuneo. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. np. According to most versions of political liberalism (PL), the government ought [...]

TOTAL TRUTH: LIBERATING CHRISTIANITY FROM ITS CULTURAL CAPTIVITY. By NANCY PEARCEY. Crossway. 479 pp. $25. IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine an encounter in the public square in which one party [...]

Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics BY ROBERT BENNE EERDMANS, 12.0 PAGES, $14 For some Americans, as for the Founding Fathers, the separation of church and [...]

James Keenan raises a number of issues concerning the relationship between feminism and the prochoice position on abortion rights in connection with a previous article discussing the views of Judith Jarvis Thomson. The point was that certain feminists are inconsistent in adopting a libertarian position with regard to abortion while supporting state intervention in other areas. This did not mean that feminism and prochoice are identical or that all feminists are antifamily. Certainly, as Keenan suggests, more attention should be given to prolife feminism.

Judith Jarvis Thomson has presented an influential argument for abortion based on the woman's right to control her body. She compares the pregnant woman to someone who is involuntarily plugged into the circulatory system of a famous violinist suffering from an otherwise fatal kidney ailment. Thomson's argument is flawed in that it assumes that moral obligations must be voluntary, denies special obligations to family members, denies prima facie rights of the unborn and ignores the distinction between killing and withholding treatment.

Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law. Edited by Michael A. Scaperlanda and Teresa Stanton Collett. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. 403 pp. np. [...]

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Polities Without Cod. By George Weigel. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 202 pp. $23.00. George Weigel opens this small, though powerful, book […]

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]