Intersections of Religion and Governance
posted by Robert Ahdieh
I write with the latest in my series: “It’s Saturday, so I must be in…”
This Saturday, I’m in Washington, at a conference I helped organize at American University, on Exploring the Intersections of Religion and Governance: Past, Present, and Future.
Over the course of the day yesterday, and continuing today, the discussion has explored historical and comparative perspectives on the relationship of religion and governance, the relevance of religious communities to the pursuit of social and economic development, intersections of religious belief with the regulation of both climate change and corruption, and even the religious dimensions of intellectual property law. Speakers have included Arash Abizadeh, Abduh An-Na’im, Jeremy Gunn, David Hunter, and Layli Miller-Muro. All told – in my admittedly biased assessment – a fasinating conference!
Anyway, for those who may be interested in questions of law and religion, the conference is being webcast, and will also be available in video format for viewing/downloading later this coming week, at http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/video.cfm.
October 11, 2008 at 10:58 am
Posted in: Religion
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Responses (2)
Miriam Cherry - October 11, 2008 at 1:27 pm
This is fascinating! My last article dealt with the recent internet gambling crackdown and its intersection with a particular interest of mine, prediction markets. I was interested to see the role that religion/morality played in the anti-gambling measures. It’s not an easy link – some christian denominations do not care about gambling, others do (vehemently). I didn’t have room in that piece to examine that link fully, but it’s something I may choose to examine (at a later time).
Thanks for posting this and I will check out the conference link later in the week.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - October 11, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I’m absolutely ignorant about prediction markets, but I suspect the Christian ambivalence with regard to gambling is related to its possible conceptualization as either a vice or sickness (sometimes: ‘addiction’ or ‘disease’), with more traditional denominations seeing this as a vice, and those more conversant in and comfortable with the Christian “gospel of wealth” rhetoric of late-twentieth century post-modernity willing to see extreme forms of gambling as a sickness. An illustrative crystallization of this ambivalence might be evidenced in the story of William Bennett. “[For] years [Bennett] had called for a higher moral tone in American life and who had served as Secretary of Education, chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and America’s first ‘drug czar’ in the war on drugs,” yet was reported to have lost $8 million in gambling over a ten year period, with much of his gambling money coming from his best-selling book, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1993)! As Mike W. Martin notes in a wonderful discussion of “pathological gambling” (From Morality to Mental Health: Virtue and Vice in a Therapeutic Culture, 2006),” “Traditionally, gambling that causes significant harm to oneself and others was a moral matter; today, ‘pathological gambling’ is a mental disorder.” Martin, unlike most on either side of this conceptual divide, argues for an integrated moral-therapeutic perspective that makes sense of both approaches. Some Christians chose to distance themselves from Bennett, while others were more sympathetic to his plight with this particular addiction, even those members of conservative evangelical organizations that opposed gambling.
Incidentally, I can’t recommend Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s latest book highly enough: Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a (2008), a link to which is at his website above.
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