Religious Freedom as if Religion Matters: A Tribute to Justice Brennan

On April 22, 1998, Professor of Law, Stephen L. Carter of Yale Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s eighteenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Religion-Centered Free Exercise: A Tribute to Justice Brennan. Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. Among his courses are law and religion, the ethics of war, contracts, evidence, and professional responsibility. His most recent book is The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama (2011). Among his other books on law and politics are God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics; Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy; The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty; The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning up the Federal Appointments Process; and The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and PoliticsTrivialize Religious Devotion. Professor Carter writes a column for Bloomberg View and is a regular contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He blogs about professional football for the Washington Post. Professor Carter also writes fiction. His novel The Emperor of Ocean Park spent eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His next novel, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, will be published in 2012. His novella “The Hereditary Thurifer” recently appeared in the crime anthology, The Dark End of the Street. Professor Carter was formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, and has received eight honorary degrees

Somaesthetics and Dance

Dance is proposed as the most representative of somaesthetic arts in Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics and other writings of Richard Shusterman. Shuster- man offers a useful, but incomplete approach to somaesthetics of dance. In the examples provided, dance appears as subordinate to another art form (theater or photography) or as a means to achieving bodily excellence. Missing, for example, are accounts of the role of dance as an independent art form, how somaesthetics would address differences in varying approaches to dance, and attention to the viewer’s somaesthetic dance experience. Three strategies for developing new directions for dance somaesthetics are offered here: identify a fuller range of applications of somaesthetics to dance as an independent art form (e.g. Martha Graham); develop somaesthetics for a wider range of theatre dance (e.g. ballet, modern and experimental dance); and relate somaesthetics to more general features of dance (content, form, expression, style, kinesthetics) necessary for understanding the roles of the choreographer/dancer and the viewer