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    From Your Gods to Our Gods. A History of Religion in Indian, South African and British Courts

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    The global world debates secularism, freedom of belief, faith-based norms, the state's arbitration of religious conflicts, and the place of the sacred in the public sphere. In facing these issues, Britain, India, and South Africa stand out as unique laboratories. They have greatly influenced the rest of the world. As single countries and together as a whole, the three have moved from the colonial clash of antagonistic religions (of your gods) to an era when it has become impossible to dissociate your god from my god. Today both belong to the same blurred reality of our gods. Through a narrative account of British, South African, and Indian court cases from 1857 to 2009, the author draws an unconventional history of the process leading from the encounter with the gods of the other to the forging of a postmodern, common, and global religion. Across ages, borders, faiths, and laws, the three countries have experienced the ambivalent interaction of society, politics, and beliefs. Hence the lesson the world might learn from them: our gods promise an idealized purity, but they can only become real in the everyday creation of mixed identities, hybrid deities, and shared fears and hopes

    The Formula ‘Freedom of Religion or Belief’ in the Laboratory of the European Union

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    This article argues that more and better knowledge about the past and present of the formula ‘freedom of religion or belief’ is likely to result in a stronger consistency between the terminology and the concept, while being conducive to a richer national and international conversation on the protection and promotion of ‘religion or belief’ related rights and freedoms. In the first section (The emergence) the author maps the chronology and context of the emergence of the formula: while confirming the importance of the United Nations, it is emphasized that UN documents were not alone, and were not in isolation. In particular, the importance of the Conference, then Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and of a general international conversation, accelerated by the adoption in 1998 of the US International Religious Freedom Act, is underlined. In the second section (The features) the most significant features of the formula are identified, and it is suggested that those features should be taken as the reasons why in the last two decades the formula has proved successful at the UN and OSCE level, as well as in the context of the European Union, mainly in its external action. In the third section (The EU laboratory) the formula is mapped in the EU context and the EU framework is interpreted as a laboratory where the formula is received, challenged and reinvented in a variety of ways. In the fourth and final session (The translation) ten sets of questions are offered with respect to the linguistic and legal translation of the formula in EU Member States. If addressed, it is held, those questions might considerably improve knowledge on the formula in both its top-down and bottom-up dynamic unfolding, thus empowering scholars and actors engaged with combining the global power of the formula in English and its variations in different languages and cultures

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    Editore: Cerdic publications, Strasbour
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